# MiniMax M3.1 Flash: another very cheap Chinese model, with open weights promised

> Chinese AI company MiniMax released M3.1 Flash on Monday through its API, its M Plan subscription and its MiniMax Code desktop app.

Published 2026-10-19T13:09:37-07:00 · News · Canonical: https://news.littlewolflabs.com/posts/2026-10-19-minimax-m3-1-flash

Chinese AI company [MiniMax](https://www.minimax.io/blog/minimax-m31f) released M3.1 Flash on Monday through its API, its M Plan subscription and its MiniMax Code desktop app. It costs $0.15 per million input tokens, $0.60 per million output tokens and $0.015 per million cached input tokens. It has a one-million-token context window and accepts text, images and video. [MiniMax](https://x.com/MiniMax_AI/status/2112150867868541221) says the "Space Bunny" model, which processed more than 200 trillion tokens while running anonymously, was an early version, and it claims the new model runs nearly three times faster and costs 70% less to use than the one before it. Independent testing from Artificial Analysis, as reported by [The Decoder](https://the-decoder.com/minimax-m3-1-flash-shows-chinas-ai-price-race-has-no-floor-in-sight/), puts it at 42 on its Intelligence Index, up from 29 for MiniMax M3 and just behind DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 at 45. It costs about $0.22 per task to run against DeepSeek's $0.26. Artificial Analysis also measured a 93% hallucination rate, because the model tries to answer every question instead of saying it doesn't know.

*What this means for you:* if you run cheap agents or coding jobs, you now have two near-equal budget options, and neither wins across the board. DeepSeek scores a little higher overall, while MiniMax is slightly cheaper per task and scored better on Humanity's Last Exam and factual recall. You can try it for free on [OpenRouter](https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m3.1-flash:free), with rate limits. If DeepSeek Flash already works for you, run both on a few of your own tasks before switching, and check MiniMax's factual answers carefully given that hallucination rate. MiniMax says the open weights are coming "later." [The Decoder](https://the-decoder.com/minimax-m3-1-flash-shows-chinas-ai-price-race-has-no-floor-in-sight/) reports Oct 23.