MiniMax is building China’s biggest AI model yet, and plans to open-source it

MiniMax plans its biggest model yet, a 2.7-trillion-parameter system it intends to open-source, The Information reports. It would be the largest Chinese model on the market, and another squeeze on US labs’ margins.

China’s open-model push has a new heavyweight on the way. MiniMax plans a large language model with 2.7 trillion parameters, The Information reports, citing two people familiar with the effort. It would dwarf the firm’s current flagship and rank as China’s largest model yet.

Inside MiniMax, the model goes by M3 Pro. The final name may change. The company aims to open-source it, and a release could land as early as the third quarter.

The scale of the jump is the headline. MiniMax’s current flagship, M3, holds 428 billion parameters. The new model runs roughly six times bigger. Bigger models tend to handle complex reasoning and multi-step tasks better, which is exactly where the frontier race now sits.

A crowded Chinese field

MiniMax does not run alone. It faces fierce competition from DeepSeek, Zhipu and Moonshot AI. Each races to ship capable models cheaply, and many carry open weights.

The stakes are commercial as well as technical. MiniMax trades publicly in Hong Kong, where AI stocks have swung hard this year. A strong open model would help it stand out in a brutal home market.

Cheap, open, and everywhere

The bigger story sits outside China. Chinese open models have spread fast in 2026. Developers reach for them to run high-volume, less-critical work at a fraction of the price of US frontier systems. Enterprises increasingly adopt open models too.

That worries the American labs. They spend billions to train frontier models, then charge a premium. Cheap, capable open weights undercut that logic. The friction already spills into fights over distillation and access. Beijing, for its part, weighs curbs on who abroad can use its best models.

Why it matters

A 2.7-trillion-parameter open model would make a statement. It would hand developers worldwide a free, powerful option, and pile more pressure on the paid frontier. For MiniMax, the launch doubles as a test. Win, and it pulls clear of its Chinese rivals. Fall short, and the open-weight crown stays up for grabs. The proof comes when the weights drop, perhaps this quarter.