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MiniMax's most downloaded model is the one you may not sell anything with

MiniMax M2.7 is pulled from Hugging Face roughly 909,000 times a month — more than any other text model the Chinese lab has published, and more than four times the traffic of its own successor M3. It is also the only one in the family that forbids commercial use. The licence file shipped with the weights is titled "Non-Commercial License". Personal use, self-hosted deployment, research and experimentation are expressly free of charge. Everything else is not: selling a product or service that relies on the model, putting it behind a paid API, or deploying a fine-tuned derivative for commercial purposes all require prior written authorisation from MiniMax, requested by e-mail. Anyone who obtains that permission must also display "Built with MiniMax M2.7" on the product. That term is an outlier rather than a direction of travel. MiniMax M2 (October 2025) and M2.1 (December 2025) were released under MIT with a single added clause: a commercial product built on the model must show the model name in its interface. In M2 that duty starts only above 100 million monthly active users or $30 million in annual recurring revenue; in M2.1 it applies with no threshold at all. M2.5 (February 2026) moved to the company's own MiniMax Model License, which still allows redistribution but requires a fixed attribution notice to accompany every copy. M2.7, released a month later, closed commercial use altogether. M3, in June 2026, reopened it under a community licence that permits commercial deployment in exchange for visible attribution. The practical consequence is easy to miss, because nothing about the download page signals it. Four models in this line share the same body — 62 layers, 256 experts, eight routed per token, and 228,689,764,864 parameters in M2, M2.1 and M2.7, to the byte. A team that swaps one for another as a drop-in upgrade changes its legal position without changing a line of code. The strongest freely reusable model in the line is M2.5; the strongest one overall, by the producer's own benchmark table, is the one that needs a signature. wujec.ai has today added catalogue profiles for M2.1, M2.5 and M2.7, each stating the licence terms in full.