MiniMax 4K Image Weights Bar US, EU and Korea
MiniMax released open weights for its H3-Image generation and editing model on Nov. 10 under a community license that excludes the U.S., the EU, the UK and South Korea and requires written authorization above $1 million in annualized revenue or for hosted services.
Chinese AI company MiniMax on Nov. 10 released the weights of H3-Image, an image generation and editing model it says can produce a 4096-by-4096-pixel image in under 10 seconds. The files are on Hugging Face for anyone to download, but the accompanying license grants no rights in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom or South Korea.
Key takeaways
- H3-Image generates roughly 16-megapixel images directly, without an upscaler, and accepts up to 16 reference images, according to MiniMax.
- Its community license, dated Nov. 10, lists the U.S., the EU, the UK and South Korea as "Excluded Territories" where use of the model or its outputs is not authorized.
- Inside the permitted territory, companies with more than $1 million in annualized revenue, or anyone offering the model as a hosted service, need separate written permission.
What MiniMax H3-Image can do
MiniMax describes H3-Image as an open-weight model built on H3, the multimodal video model it launched on July 31. A single checkpoint handles text-to-image generation, reference-based generation and image editing.
The Hugging Face model card says it outputs images of about 16 megapixels at every aspect ratio, from 4096x4096 to 6272x2688 for 21:9. The model is distilled to six sampling steps and uses no classifier-free guidance, two choices aimed at speed.
In its launch post, MiniMax claims generation at up to five times the speed of "mainstream alternatives" and pricing at 50% to 70% of comparable services through its API. It is offering 50% off 4K-and-above requests during launch week. None of these comparisons has been independently tested.
H3-Image hardware requirements
The core diffusion transformer has 33.1 billion parameters across 50 layers. Its BF16 weight files alone come to 66.28 GB, and the text encoder, loaded separately from the H3 repository, adds another 66.7 GB.
MiniMax recommends serving it with SGLang, vLLM-Omni, Hugging Face diffusers or ComfyUI. The card lists NVIDIA H200, RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell and AMD Instinct MI350X among supported accelerators, which puts local use beyond most consumer PCs.
What the H3-Image license excludes
The MiniMax-H3-Image Community License Agreement defines the Applicable Territory as "worldwide, excluding the Excluded Territories," and names those as the EU, the UK, the Republic of Korea and the United States.
Section V.4 bars using, reproducing, modifying, distributing or displaying the model or "any of their Outputs" outside that territory. Section V.3 forbids using the model or its outputs to improve any other AI model.
The license does not explain the exclusions. It says MiniMax will keep evaluating laws in those regions and invites anyone there to ask for a license, which "will be granted based on robust controls and guardrails." Disputes go to Hong Kong courts.
| Item | Term |
|---|---|
| Excluded Territories | U.S., EU, UK, South Korea |
| Written authorization needed | Annualized revenue above $1 million, or any hosted service for third parties |
| Branding | "MiniMax-H3-Image" shown prominently in commercial products |
| Training other models | Prohibited, including with outputs |
| Governing law | Hong Kong |
A pattern in open-weight AI licenses
The terms mirror those of H3 itself. The H3 license, dated Aug. 2, names the same four Excluded Territories.
Baidu took a similar route on Nov. 5 with ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, whose license excludes the EU, the UK and South Korea but not the United States. Baidu's written-authorization threshold is $50 million in related revenue, 50 times MiniMax's $1 million.
What's next
H3-Image is also available through the MiniMax API, MiniMax Code and the Hailuo AI app. MiniMax has not said whether those hosted services are offered in the excluded regions or whether the territorial terms will change.
FAQ
Can developers in the U.S. or South Korea use MiniMax H3-Image weights?
The license grants them no rights to do so. MiniMax says people in those regions may contact it to request a separate license.
Is H3-Image open source?
The weights are downloadable, but territorial limits, a $1 million revenue threshold and a ban on training other models make it a custom-licensed open-weight model, not open source in the Apache or MIT sense.
How fast is H3-Image?
MiniMax says under 10 seconds for a 4096x4096 image. That figure comes from the company and has not been independently verified.
References
- MiniMax H3-Image: Bringing 4K Image Generation into the 10-Second Era — MiniMax (Nov. 11, 2026)
- MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3-Image — Hugging Face model card
- LICENSE · MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3-Image — Hugging Face (Nov. 10, 2026)
- LICENSE · MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3 — Hugging Face (Aug. 2, 2026)
- MiniMax H3: An Open Model Breaking the Boundaries Between Tasks and Modalities — MiniMax (July 31, 2026)
Editor responsible for AI Newsway. Writes about AI, developer tools, cloud and productivity technology.
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