MiniMax releases M3.1 Flash AI model at $0.15 per million tokens with major performance gains

On October 19, 2026, Chinese AI company MiniMax launched MiniMax M3.1 Flash, a 428-billion parameter mixture-of-experts model priced at $0.15 per million input tokens. Independent testing by Artificial Analysis shows M3.1 Flash reached 42 on its Intelligence Index while lowering task costs to $0.22, undercutting rivals like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. However, testing also revealed a 93% hallucination rate, as the model attempts almost all questions rather than acknowledging uncertainty.

Model release and availability

• ▪MiniMax confirmed that an earlier build of MiniMax M3.1 Flash operated anonymously under the name Space Bunny, processing over 200 trillion tokens prior to its official launch.
• ▪Chinese AI company MiniMax released MiniMax M3.1 Flash on October 19, 2026, featuring 428 billion total parameters, about 23 billion active parameters in a mixture-of-experts architecture, and a 1,000,000-token context window.
• ▪MiniMax scheduled the open-weight model release for MiniMax M3.1 Flash for October 23, 2026.

Pricing and task costs

• ▪MiniMax reported that all five reasoning effort levels for MiniMax M3.1 Flash stayed below $0.05 per task on its Automation-Bench chart.
• ▪Artificial Analysis found MiniMax M3.1 Flash's Intelligence Index task evaluation cost dropped 57 percent to $0.22 from MiniMax M3's $0.51, compared to $0.26 for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017, $0.28 for GLM-5.3 Flash, and $1.24 for Gemini 3.8 Flash.
• ▪MiniMax M3.1 Flash API pricing is set at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, with cached input reads priced at $0.015 per million tokens.
• ▪MiniMax reported that MiniMax M3.1 Flash reduces overall usage costs for AI agents by 70 percent compared to MiniMax M3.

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index scores

• ▪Artificial Analysis reported that DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017 scored 45 on its Intelligence Index, while Gemini 3.8 Flash scored 41.
• ▪Artificial Analysis awarded MiniMax M3.1 Flash a score of 42 on its Intelligence Index, an increase of 13 points over the MiniMax M3 model's score of 29.

Intelligence Index output token volume

• ▪Artificial Analysis found MiniMax M3.1 Flash generated approximately 189 million output tokens during its Intelligence Index evaluation, compared to roughly 324 million for GLM-5.3 Flash and 334 million for Gemini 3.8 Flash.
• ▪Artificial Analysis reported that DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017 generated approximately 224 million output tokens during its Intelligence Index evaluation.

Output generation speeds

• ▪MiniMax reported that MiniMax M3.1 Flash operates about three times faster than MiniMax M3, with median output speeds consistently exceeding 170 tokens per second.
• ▪MiniMax reported that MiniMax M3.1 Flash can reach peak generation speeds exceeding 200 tokens per second.

AA-omniscience benchmark results

• ▪MiniMax M3.1 Flash achieved an overall AA-Omniscience benchmark score of 16 despite correctly answering 56 percent of factual questions, compared to 43 percent for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash-1017 and 28 percent for GLM-5.3 Flash.
• ▪Artificial Analysis reported that MiniMax M3.1 Flash demonstrated a 93 percent hallucination rate on the AA-Omniscience benchmark because the model attempted nearly every question rather than acknowledging uncertainty.