MiniMax H3

What it is

MiniMax H3 is the model that replaced Hailuo 2.3 at the top of MiniMax’s video line. It launched in the Hailuo app and API on 31 July 2026, where it appears as Hailuo 3.0, and the weights followed onto Hugging Face, GitHub and ModelScope on 3 August. Within days of that release the public arenas had it at or near the top of the field, and as the strongest openly published video model it now carries the standard for the open-weight side of the market.

What is actually new

The headline change is that H3 is one model rather than a toolbox. MiniMax describes the design as an Omni Transformer, a single 33-billion-parameter system that takes text, images, video and audio together as context. A single generation can draw on up to nine reference images, three reference clips and three reference audio tracks, which folds the jobs that used to need separate editing, reference and motion tools into one pass. Two checkpoints were published: a text-to-video model that also handles first-and-last-frame control, and an omni-reference model for generations steered by supplied material.

The second change is sound. H3 generates 32kHz stereo audio, including dialogue, effects and ambience, in the same pass as the picture. Hailuo 2.3 made no claim of native audio at all, so this closes the gap that had opened up against Google’s Veo line and ByteDance’s newest Seedance releases. Output runs up to 2K resolution at 24 frames per second, in clips of 4 to 15 seconds, with stable speech in eleven languages.

The scoreboard

On the Artificial Analysis video arena, checked on 8 August 2026, H3 sits second in text-to-video with audio on an Elo of 1,240, four points behind Google’s Gemini Omni Flash, second in image-to-video with audio, and first outright in video editing. Arena’s separate leaderboard put the same release 280 points clear of the next best open model, Tencent’s HunyuanVideo 1.5, with Hailuo 2.3 back at 27th. Leaderboards move week to week, but on the boards that working teams actually watch, the open-weight crown changed hands at the end of July.

Price and access

The published pay-as-you-go rates are $0.13 a second for 2K output and $0.08 a second at 768p, with a $0.05-a-second rate for upscaling an existing 768p generation to 2K. MiniMax’s own framing is that the 2K rate undercuts mainstream rivals by more than two thirds, which is its claim rather than an audited comparison, but the listed prices do sit well below Veo-class rates. Access runs through the Hailuo app, the MiniMax Hub desktop app, the Open Platform API under the model id MiniMax-H3, and the usual third-party hosts, including OpenRouter and fal.ai.

The licence catch

The open weights come with a serious geographic restriction, and it needs reading before anyone builds on them. The MiniMax H3 Community License, effective 2 August 2026, names the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States and South Korea as excluded territories: the licence does not permit using the weights, or their outputs, inside them. Press reporting has linked the carve-out to ongoing copyright litigation against MiniMax, though the company’s own licence text gives no reason. Organisations with more than $20 million in annual revenue also need separate written authorisation. For a UK team the practical reading is short: the app and the API are fine, self-hosting the weights is not licensed here.

How it fits the field

H3 lands as the clearest statement yet of the pattern this hub has tracked all year: the strongest open video models come from China, and they are now trading places at the very top of the boards with the closed Western flagships rather than trailing them. Teams already on Hailuo 2.3 get character motion that no longer arrives silent; teams choosing a vendor fresh get frontier-grade output at open-market prices, with the licence question above deciding how they run it. The wider field, and where each rival stands, is on our AI video models hub, with the labs behind them covered across the AI section.