MiniMax H3 Weights Are Up, License Bars 4 Markets

Two days ago we published a MiniMax H3 review that ended with a tracked promise: the weights would land "within days." They landed. The license is the story now.

MiniMax H3's weights went up on Hugging Face around August 3. The model card lists a license date of August 2, 2026 [1]. The repo (MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3) shows 12,102 downloads and 2,675 likes as of our August 6 API capture [1]. The community moved faster than the official repo: a ComfyUI single-file repack by Comfy-Org has already racked up 2,295,377 downloads [3]. The open-weights promise is no longer outstanding. What's outstanding is who's allowed to use it.

What shipped

H3-Base is a 33B-parameter checkpoint with a minimum download size of roughly 42.5GB, released as two checkpoints — FL2VA for text- and frame-based generation, Ref2VA for reference-conditioned work [2]. It's the video-generation model that topped Artificial Analysis's video editing leaderboard, hit #1 on Hugging Face trending (above DeepSeek V4 Flash), and charges RMB 0.8 per second of 2K video (~$0.13 internationally), about a third of what flagship rivals charge [4]. The weights were the last open item. Now they're closed — differently.

The license, verbatim

The H3 Community License Agreement is not an OSI open-source license. It's a custom grant, and the first thing it does is carve out territory [1]:

"Excluded Territories" means the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States of America.

"Applicable Territory" is defined as worldwide minus those exclusions. So the license grants use, reproduction, distribution, and derivatives, but only outside the EU, UK, South Korea, and the US.

Two details matter if you're a developer:

• The restriction extends to Model Derivatives, including distillation and training on synthetic outputs [1]. You can't route around it by training on H3 output.
• The licensor is Nanonoble Pte. Ltd., MiniMax's Singapore entity, and the agreement includes an Acceptable Use Policy you must accept by using the model at all [1].

Downloading is not blocked. Usage is what's licensed. For a US or EU dev, H3 is effectively a model you can read but not ship.

Why this is a story, not a footnote

Open weights from Chinese labs have been the feel-good narrative of 2026: K3 (Moonshot AI's 2.8T release), the 180K downloads in 72 hours, the fine-tune ecosystem [5]. MiniMax just added a twist nobody's talking about yet: license-gated geography.

It's also symmetric. The White House reportedly told Silicon Valley in a closed-door meeting that Chinese open-weight models would be exempt from US security review [6]. That's Washington deciding not to block downloads. MiniMax, meanwhile, decided its weights are for everywhere except Washington, Brussels, London, and Seoul. Both sides are using the same tool (the distribution decision) for opposite reasons.

For our compliance baseline this is a clean case: the license text is public, we quote it, and the AI Act / export-control framing is the reader's call, not a claim we need to make.

What we're tracking

• The Acceptable Use Policy details (Exhibit A). We've captured the license but not yet read the full AUP [1].
• Enterprise deployment. The 33B size is hostable on a single node, so the real test is whether MiniMax enforces territory checks on self-hosters.
• The ecosystem response. The ComfyUI repack and a Turbo LoRA that appeared August 5 [7] suggest the community is, so far, ignoring the license, which is a story on its own.

Bottom line

MiniMax H3 is open-weight but not open-source, and its license excludes the EU, UK, South Korea, and the US. If you're outside those markets, the video model that topped the charts is yours to run. If you're inside them, read the LICENSE before you touch the repo: it's short, and it means what it says.

Sources

1. MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3 model card + LICENSE (H3 Community License Agreement, license date 2026-08-02, Excluded Territories clause, Nanonoble Pte. Ltd.), huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3 (API capture 2026-08-06, official)
2. AtlasCloud guide (33B params, 42.5GB, two checkpoints, 8/3 release window), atlascloud.ai (published 2026-08-03, captured 2026-08-06, media) + XenoSpectrum (checkpoint split: FL2VA / Ref2VA), xenospectrum.com (published 2026-08-04, captured 2026-08-07, media)
3. Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3 (2,295,377 downloads), huggingface.co (API capture 2026-08-06, re-verified 2026-08-07, official platform data)
4. In-site H3 review (minimax-h3-video-review) + PingWest (AA video editing #1, HF trending #1 above DeepSeek V4 Flash, RMB 0.8/sec 2K pricing), pingwest.com/a/316100 (published 2026-07-31, captured 2026-08-06, media) + Artificial Analysis video editing leaderboard (H3 #1, Elo 1,130), artificialanalysis.ai/video/leaderboard/video-editing (accessed 2026-08-07, third-party eval)
5. In-site K3 review (kimi-k3-open-weights-review, "Kimi K3: 180K downloads, 340 fine-tunes, 72 hours") + CSDN (180K downloads, 340+ fine-tunes in 72h), csdn.net (published 2026-08-05, captured 2026-08-06, media)
6. OSChina citing Bloomberg (White House closed-door exemption for Chinese open-weight models), oschina.net/news/488173/china-s-open-weight-models-to-be-spared-us-tests-us-firms-told (published 2026-08-05, captured 2026-08-06, media) + Bloomberg original: "China's Open-Weight Models to Be Spared US Tests, US Firms Told", bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-05/china-s-open-weight-models-to-be-spared-us-tests-us-firms-told (published 2026-08-05, accessed 2026-08-07, primary news outlet)
7. larryvrh/MiniMax-H3-Turbo-Lora (created 2026-08-05), huggingface.co (API capture 2026-08-06, official platform data)
8. MiniMax international pricing (2K at ~$0.13 per second), platform.minimax.io/docs/guides/pricing-paygo, as reported by AIToolsReview (published 2026-08-02, accessed 2026-08-07, media citing official pricing page)

Disclosure: no sponsors, no affiliate links. Compiled from public sources with capture dates; we did not run H3 ourselves. License text quoted from the model card as captured. Core Hugging Face figures re-verified against the live API on August 7, 2026; pricing and ranking figures are from the cited media/third-party sources.