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MiniMax ships M3 — open-weight frontier claims, weights to follow
Cheap, capable, and not quite downloadable yet. The brief.
The FeaturedDaily DeskVerified June 2026
MiniMax launched M3 on 1 June 2026, an open-weight frontier coding model, 1M context.
What happened. On 1 June, MiniMax released M3, billed as the first open-weight model to combine frontier coding, a 1M-token context and native image/video understanding, built on its new MiniMax Sparse Attention. It reports 59.0% on SWE-Bench Pro — ahead of GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro (MiniMax's own figures).
The money. Launch pricing of roughly $0.30 input / $1.20 output per million tokens (promotional) lands at about a tenth of the closed frontier — the genuinely disruptive part.
Sources
- MiniMax M3 Open-Weight Coding Model: Frontier Claims, Unverified Benchmarks — Tech Times, 1 June 2026
- MiniMax launches M3, an open-weight frontier model with 1M context — DataNorth, 1 June 2026
- What Is MiniMax M3? The First Open-Weight Frontier Coding Model — Apidog, 2 June 2026