MiniMax released H3-Image on 10 November 2026, an open-weight model that creates and edits images of about 16 megapixels. Anyone can download the weights from Hugging Face. MiniMax’s own licence, however, excludes the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and South Korea, and says the model and its images may not be used there.
One 33-billion-parameter model makes new images and edits them at up to 16 megapixels
H3-Image puts text-to-image and image editing in a single checkpoint. Its core is a diffusion transformer, the kind of network behind most image generators, with 33.1 billion parameters. MiniMax trimmed it to six sampling steps, which is where its speed comes from.
The model’s native size is about 16 megapixels at every aspect ratio, from 4096 by 4096 pixels for a square to 6272 by 2688 for a 21:9 banner. MiniMax compares that with the 1 to 4 megapixels common today. An edit can combine up to 16 reference images. One of MiniMax’s examples turns an empty room and nine separate pieces of furniture into one furnished living room. Other examples show Chinese and English text rendered on puzzle boards.
MiniMax’s blog headline promises 4K images in “the 10-second era”. The vLLM project, which builds software to serve such models, measured under 4 seconds for a 16.8-megapixel image on four Nvidia H200 GPUs. On fal.ai, which hosts the model as a paid service, smaller example images took 12 to 14 seconds. MiniMax calls its instruction following the strongest among open models, but publishes no benchmark against GPT Image, Nano Banana or other rivals.
The licence stops at the borders of the EU, UK, US and South Korea
The MiniMax-H3-Image Community License grants rights “solely within the Applicable Territory”: the whole world minus four excluded regions. Section V.4 says you may not use, modify, distribute or display the model “or any of their Outputs or results outside the Applicable Territory”. That covers the images, not just the weights.
Elsewhere, more conditions apply. Companies with annual revenue above $1 million, and anyone who offers the model to others as a hosted service, need written permission from MiniMax first. A commercial product must show the name “MiniMax-H3-Image” in its interface. Images from the model may not be used to improve other AI models, and disputes go to the courts of Hong Kong.
MiniMax gives no reason in the image licence. MiniMax used the same exclusion for its H3 video model. In a licence Q&A for that model, it pointed to the EU AI Act, unclear rules for AI video in the UK and South Korea, and copyright cases in the US. It called the limit “not yet”, not “not ever”, and said organisations in those regions can apply for a formal licence.
Through MiniMax’s API, a 4K image costs about 3 cents until 17 November
The licence does not mention MiniMax’s own API, which runs under its platform terms. For the video model, MiniMax kept its API available worldwide. Its price list gives these example costs per generated image:
- 1K (1024 by 1024): $0.022;
- 2K (2048 by 2048): $0.023;
- 4K (4096 by 4096): $0.069, halved to $0.034 until 17 November, 16:00 UTC;
- the faster H3-Image-Highspeed variant costs about twice as much at 4K.
MiniMax calls these estimates, because the real cost depends on the length of your prompt.
European teams cannot use H3-Image for the in-house setup open weights are meant for
Organisations usually choose an open-weight model so they can run it on their own servers and keep images and prompts in their own hands. For a team in the Netherlands, H3-Image’s licence rules out exactly that. Running it is also no small job: the image model alone is a download of about 69 gigabytes, and the published speed figures come from Nvidia’s H200 data-centre GPUs.
If you work in the EU, do not put H3-Image into a production workflow on the strength of the Hugging Face download, and do not use images from it in your own marketing. If the quality tempts you, ask your legal team to check MiniMax’s API terms or apply for MiniMax’s licence before anyone builds on it. For image generation you run yourself, choose a model whose licence covers the countries where your people and customers are.
For more information, visit the official announcement of MiniMax H3-Image on the MiniMax blog.
