FLUX 3

What it is

FLUX 3 is Black Forest Labs stepping out of still images. The German lab behind the FLUX.2 image family announced the generation on 23 July 2026 under the banner of “real world models”, and note the branding: it is FLUX 3 with a space, not FLUX.3, a deliberate break from the dot notation of the image line. The surprise is the order of arrival. The first FLUX 3 product to ship is a video model, generally available through the BFL API since 4 August 2026, while the image successor to FLUX.2 was announced for “the following weeks” and had still not shipped as of 21 August 2026: the lab’s own blog carries the video release and the July research posts and nothing else under the name. Anyone who has heard of FLUX 3 has, for now, heard of a video model.

What the video model does

FLUX 3 Video generates clips of up to 20 seconds in a single pass, in HD with a Full HD upscale path, and produces its soundtrack natively in the same generation: multilingual dialogue with lip-sync, effects and ambience, included in the per-second price rather than billed separately. Beyond text-to-video and image-to-video it handles video-to-video editing, continuation from up to 4 seconds of existing footage, keyframe transitions, and chaining multi-scene sequences, which BFL pitches at agent-driven production pipelines. The 20-second single-pass ceiling is the standout spec: most of the field still tops out at 8 to 15 seconds per generation.

The benchmark question

BFL’s own published evaluations have FLUX 3 preferred over Runway Gen-4.5 in 77 percent of comparisons and over Luma’s Ray 3.2 in 93 percent, with an internal Elo chart placing it first among the systems it tested. Those are the lab’s own numbers, and the independent picture has filled in since: on the Artificial Analysis text-to-video board checked on 8 August 2026 FLUX 3 was absent from the top five, but on the arena.ai text-to-video board checked on 29 August 2026 FLUX 3 Video ranks third on an Elo of 1,495, behind only Google’s Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash on 1,515 and Gemini Omni Flash on 1,512, and it sits seventh on image-to-video on 1,447. Third behind the two Google models is a serious showing for a lab’s first video release; the vendor’s chart put it first, the public board puts it third, and the second number is the one a buying decision should use.

Price and access

The API is pay-as-you-go with no subscription. Text-to-video and image-to-video run $0.06 a second in draft HD, $0.17 a second in standard HD and $0.29 a second in Full HD; video-to-video editing is dearer at $0.12, $0.41 and $0.53 respectively. That puts a standard HD clip in the same band as Veo-class pricing rather than the budget tier, with the native audio softening the comparison since rivals often price sound separately or lack it. There is no consumer app: access is the BFL API and selected partner platforms.

The rest of the line

The announcement sketched a wider family than the video model. FLUX 3 Action, a robotics variant, is in early access with a single named partner, mimic robotics, whose systems using it have been tested on Audi production lines. FLUX 3 Dev, the open-weight backbone that would continue BFL’s practice of publishing runnable weights, is listed as coming soon with no licence terms published yet. And the image model that will actually succeed FLUX.2 remains the missing piece: until it ships, FLUX.2 and its variants stay BFL’s current image lineup, and this page is the family’s only shipped product.

How to read it

The honest summary is a lab making a serious bet that one architecture can span video, images and robot control, with exactly one generally available product so far and a benchmark case that still rests on its own slides. For teams already paying for video generation the 20-second clips and bundled audio are worth a trial against the incumbents on our AI video models hub; for everyone waiting on the image side, the answer to “is FLUX 3 out?” is: the video model is, the image model is not. The wider field sits across the AI section.