MiniMax M2.1

MiniMax M2.1 arrived on 22 December 2025, two months after M2, with the weights published on Hugging Face two days earlier. It is not a new architecture: 62 layers, 256 experts with 8 routed per token, 228,689,764,864 parameters in total — the same figure, to the byte, as M2 — and about 10 billion of them active on any given token. Everything that changed happened in training, aimed at robustness in coding, tool use, instruction following and long-horizon planning. The gains were largest where M2 was weakest. On SWE-bench Multilingual the score rose from 56.5 to 72.5, on Multi-SWE-bench from 36.2 to 49.4, and on Terminal-bench 2.0 from 30.0 to 47.9 — the last of those a 60% relative jump. On the headline SWE-bench Verified the move was more modest, 69.4 to 74.0, which puts M2.1 between Claude Sonnet 4.5 (77.2) and DeepSeek V3.2 (73.1) by MiniMax's own table. The company also introduced VIBE, its own benchmark for building complete applications from scratch and judging them by an agent inside a real runtime; M2.1 averaged 88.6 there against 67.5 for M2. The licence is worth reading on its own. M2.1 shipped under an MIT licence with a single added clause: any commercial product built on it must show "MiniMax M2.1" in its interface. M2 carried the same rider, but only above 100 million monthly users or $30 million in recurring revenue — M2.1 dropped the threshold. It was still the last model of the M-series on recognisably open-source terms. Its successors moved first to MiniMax's own model licence, then, with M2.7, to terms that forbid commercial use without written permission. Anyone who needs a capable agentic coder with no strings attached is, as of August 2026, looking at this model or at M2. MiniMax still sells it: $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output, with a high-speed tier at double that. On Hugging Face the weights were downloaded some 27,000 times in the last thirty days — a fraction of what its successors pull, which is the usual fate of an intermediate release.

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