Chinese AI firm MiniMax launches M3.1 Flash model, claims 70% cut in agent costs

Chinese artificial intelligence developer MiniMax Group Inc. released M3.1 Flash on October 19, 2026, an update to the M3 large language model launched in June. The new model targets the high cost of running AI agents, which often require dozens of model calls to complete a single job. According to MiniMax, M3.1 Flash reduces agentic task costs by 70% compared to its previous model, while increasing inference speed nearly threefold, with everyday peak output exceeding 200 tokens per second.

The model maintains approximately 428 billion parameters, achieving speed gains through more aggressive sparsity at inference time. It supports text, image, and video input, offers a 1 million token context window, and retains reasoning capabilities with five selectable effort levels. In MiniMax's own testing, M3.1 Flash scored 61.7 on OSWorld V2, which tests computer operation capabilities, 76.2 on BankerToolBench for banking workflows, and 82% on CyberGym for reproducing software vulnerabilities.

Pricing positions M3.1 Flash directly against competitors: input costs are set at 15 cents per million tokens, matching the off-peak rate of Hangzhou-based DeepSeek's V4.1-Flash model. While DeepSeek claimed its V4.1-Flash resolved 77% of tasks on the DeepSWE v1.1 software engineering test versus M3.1 Flash's 73.7%, neither result has been independently verified. MiniMax also confirmed that the anonymous 'Space Bunny' model previously seen on OpenRouter was an early build of M3.1 Flash.