MiniMax ships open-weight image model, bars US, EU, UK and South Korea
What's the deal? Chinese AI firm MiniMaxDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has released the weights of H3-Image, a 33.1-billion-parameter image model, but its community licence excludes users in the US, EU, UK and South Korea by default. The files are published on Hugging Face, where developers elsewhere can download and run the model themselves.
What does it do? H3-Image handles both text-to-image generation and editing from a single checkpoint, built on a diffusion transformer architecture. MiniMax says it produces native 16-megapixel images — at resolutions up to 6272×2688 — without a separate upscaling step, and accepts up to 16 reference images.
How fast? The company says the model generates a 4096×4096 image in under 10 seconds, running in six sampling steps with no classifier-free guidance. Those performance claims have not been independently benchmarked.
The catch: Access is only half the transaction. Businesses with annualized revenue above $1 million need prior written authorization, as does anyone offering the model as a hosted service to third parties. People in the four excluded markets may contact MiniMax to seek a separate licence; the published agreement does not itself authorize them to use the release.
Why now? This repeats the geofence MiniMax placed on its H3 video model in August, making it a policy rather than a one-off. The new $1 million revenue threshold is lower than H3's reported $20 million, tightening the commercial terms.
What could go wrong? It remains unclear how MiniMax will apply territorial rules to images that cross borders, or what hardware the model requires beyond its deployment examples. The DiT weights alone run to 66.28GB on disk, with the text encoder adding another 66.7GB.
The signal: The gap between open weights and open-use rights is widening. Open models from China increasingly ship with a map attached — and that map excludes the markets with the strictest liability rules, meaning developers there may need a separate licence or a vendor's hosted service.
Read more: dailyinference.news
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
