MiniMax H3 open weights: what is public, and what the licence actually restricts

Partly open. MiniMax publishes two H3-Base checkpoints — FL2VA and Ref2VA — on Hugging Face, while H3-Context-IR and H3-Regenerate-2K stay hosted. The licence is not an open-source licence either: it excludes the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States, and §V.4 extends that exclusion to the outputs.

Every clause below is quoted from the published text. A summary, not legal advice.

Is MiniMax H3 open source? Not by the OSI definition

Open weights and open source are not the same claim, and the difference is checkable rather than rhetorical.

The Open Source Definition has ten criteria. This licence fails two.

• Criterion 5, no discrimination against persons or groups. §I.5 excludes four markets by name; §IV.1 adds a revenue condition.
• Criterion 6, no discrimination against fields of endeavour. §V.3 bars improving other AI models, and Exhibit A rules out whole use categories.

OSI's own annotation settles the territory question: a conforming licence may remind you to obey export restrictions; it may not incorporate them. This one puts the territory inside the grant.

You are downloading the middle third of the system

H3 runs in three stages and MiniMax released the middle one.

Without Context-IR you write that brief yourself, and the official examples run 8,565 to 39,299 tokens — not something you improvise in two sentences.

H3-Base ships as two checkpoints: FL2VA for text and first/last-frame work, Ref2VA for reference-led work. Locally you stop at 768p.

Applicable Territory, and the four names in it

The licence sets its boundary before it defines anything else: its scope is "expressly limited to the 'Applicable Territory'". §I.3 defines that as worldwide minus the Excluded Territories, and §I.5 names them — the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States.

§II then opens the grant with three words that do all the work: "Solely within the Applicable Territory". The restriction is not a footnote at the back; it is the frame the grant sits inside.

One thing to settle first, because it decides which document you are reading at all. §I.6 scopes this agreement to the model "as released at huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3". Never downloaded a checkpoint? Then you never accepted it, and your provider's terms are what bind you.

The territory follows the finished video too

This is the clause most coverage stops just short of. §V.4: you may not "use, reproduce, modify, distribute, or display the MiniMax H3 Works or any of their Outputs or results outside the Applicable Territory."

Outputs. Not just weights.

Your answer has two locations, not one. Render on a Frankfurt GPU and the render is outside the grant. Render lawfully in Singapore, then run the finished spot in Berlin, and the campaign is outside it too. The geo-fence travels with the file. Exhibit A repeats it as prohibited use number one.

What you owe if you ship a product on these weights

Commercial use is allowed inside the Applicable Territory, and it is free until $20 million. What it is not is unconditional.

• Display "MiniMax H3" prominently in your product's interface (§IV.2, mandatory — and why the name sits in ours).
• Pass this agreement to anyone you distribute the Works to (§III.1).
• Flag modified files (§III.2).
• Ship a NOTICE file if you redistribute outside a hosted service (§III.4).
• Bind downstream users to the §V and Exhibit A protections (§V.2).
• If people generate through your product, §V.5 wants safeguards, an abuse-report channel, investigation and suspension for repeat violators — trust-and-safety work, not a paragraph in your terms.
• Past $20 million, get written authorisation first (§IV.1).

Then read §VI.3 with §VII.2 before you promise a client anything. Everything is as-is, and you indemnify MiniMax, not the reverse.

Downloading without pulling 498 GB

The repository holds the original checkpoints and the diffusers conversion side by side, which is why an unscoped pull runs to roughly 498.5 GB. MiniMax says as much on the model card: scope the download to what your framework needs.

Scoped, one original partition is about 144 GB. The ComfyUI compact FL2VA stack is about 42.47 GB — a twelfth of the repository, for the same generation modes. Diffusers users can skip the file list entirely, since ModularPipeline pulls only what it needs. The ComfyUI guide has the exact four files and where they go.

Why the weights alone will not look like Hailuo

If your local results feel flatter than the launch reel, your parameters are probably fine. You are running one stage of three.

The demo footage went through Context-IR first, which turned a rough idea into a shot-by-shot brief, and Regenerate-2K afterwards, which re-rendered at 2K from the original context instead of guessing detail out of pixels. Locally you supply the first and skip the second.

That gap is real and partly closable: write the structured brief properly and 768p local output gets a long way closer. The reel you are comparing against had two extra passes, not a better GPU.

Excluded? Two routes, and one case where you should not use this site

MiniMax calls the limit "not yet", not "not ever", and §II puts it in the grant: people in the Excluded Territories are "welcome to contact us about obtaining a license", granted on "robust controls and guardrails". The application sits at platform.minimax.io/h3-license. MiniMax staff have said on Hugging Face that approval is effectively automatic — a forum reply, not licence text.

The second route is hosted. The official Q&A is blunt: the API is globally available; the open weights are temporarily limited in certain regions. Five routes, compared.

Now the part against our own interest. If you are inside the Applicable Territory, have server-class hardware, and want to study or fine-tune the model, self-hosting is your answer and we cannot give it to you — we hand back files, never parameters. And if you need commercial rights to what you generate, do not generate it here: every plan on this site, the free one included, is personal and evaluation use.

For the record, this licence reaches us too. §IV.2 is why "MiniMax H3" sits in our interface and §V.5 is why we run an abuse-report channel. We are an independent third party, not endorsed by MiniMax.

The questions people ask first

Are the open weights really open? The weights are. The licence is not an open-source licence, and the system is not open-source AI.

Can I download them in the US? The repository is not gated, so technically yes. Using them there is what §I.5 does not authorise. Same answer for the EU, the UK and South Korea — all four are named in the same clause.

Does that apply to the videos I make? Yes. §V.4 covers Outputs and results too. Where it is rendered and where it is shown are separate questions.

Who owns what I generate? You do, as far as MiniMax is concerned. §VI.4: it "claims no rights over the Outputs you generate."

Can I use it commercially? Inside the Applicable Territory, yes, free under $20M yearly revenue, with the §IV.2 and §V duties attached.

Can I train my own model on H3 output? No. §V.3 bars it, and §I.11 covers distillation and synthetic-data training.

How is this different from LTX 2.5's licence? H3 asks where you are; LTX asks what you are building.

Can I get 2K from the downloaded weights? Not on their own. Regenerate-2K is hosted, including the ComfyUI node that reaches it.

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A summary, not legal advice — read the licence itself before you build on it. If the territory clause rules you out, the hosted routes are a separate arrangement.