MiniMax M3

Full Guide

MiniMax M3 is an open-weight, natively multimodal model from MiniMax for coding, agent workflows, long-context reasoning, and image or video understanding. MiniMax officially released M3 on June 1, 2026.

What MiniMax M3 does

MiniMax says M3 uses its MiniMax Sparse Attention architecture and supports context windows of up to one million tokens. The model is designed for software development, tool use, multi-step agent work, and multimodal inputs rather than text-only chat.

The official release describes two operating modes: a thinking mode for more complex reasoning and agent tasks, and a faster non-thinking mode for latency-sensitive work such as conversation or code completion. Those capabilities make M3 relevant to teams evaluating coding assistants, research agents, long-document workflows, and applications that need to combine text with images or video.

Access and pricing

MiniMax provides M3 through MiniMax Code, its Token Plans, and the MiniMax API. API pricing varies with input length and service tier, while Token Plans package model usage into monthly subscriptions. Buyers should confirm the current rates and limits on MiniMax’s official pages before estimating production cost.

What to verify

Performance figures in MiniMax’s launch material are vendor-reported. Kingy.ai has not independently reproduced those benchmarks. Teams should test task reliability, latency, tool-call behavior, data handling, and total cost on their own workloads before moving M3 into production.

Official sources

• MiniMax M3 release announcement
• MiniMax M3 model overview
• MiniMax API documentation