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MiniMax-M2.7

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NON-COMMERCIAL LICENSE
Non-commercial use permitted based on MIT-style terms; commercial use requires prior written authorization.
Copyright (c) 2026 MiniMax
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software for non-commercial purposes, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or provide copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

1. The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
2. If the Software (or any derivative works thereof) is used for any Commercial Use, you shall prominently display "Built with MiniMax M2.7" on a related website, user interface, blogpost, about page or product documentation.
3. Any Commercial Use of the Software or any derivative work thereof is prohibited without obtaining a separate, prior written authorization from MiniMax. To request such authorization, please contact api@minimax.io with the subject line "M2.7 licensing".
4. "Commercial Use" means any use of the Software or any derivative work thereof that is primarily intended for commercial advantage or monetary compensation, which includes, without limitation: (i) offering products or services to third parties for a fee, which utilize, incorporate, or rely on the Software or its derivatives, (ii) the commercial use of APIs provided by or for the Software or its derivatives, including to support or enable commercial products, services, or operations, whether in a cloud-based, hosted, or other similar environment, and (iii) the deployment or provision of the Software or its derivatives that have been subjected to post-training, fine-tuning, instruction-tuning, or any other form of modification, for any commercial purpose.
   THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

i think for personal use no problem but if use it for commercial purpose then you need to take permission

gopi87 - I'm waiting for minimax official answer

@gopi87 - why just unhelpfully paste the community-hostile license?

The license they had 6 hours before public release was so much more reasonable:
https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.7/commit/1eece56934dda5c770bdb7fec67021222b705629

not legal advice, but just my thoughts:
I think we can take the Kimi K2.5/Composer precedent as a comparison here. Cursor used Firework AI's infra, so they had to comply with their licensing terms, instead of Moonshot's directly because Fireworks had a B2B deal with Moonshot.
MiniMax probably will do that or even already does that kind of deal.
and personal usage is already okay here.

@gopi87 - why just unhelpfully paste the community-hostile license?

The whole license is what matters, not what anyone says is OK.

The license they had 6 hours before public release was so much more reasonable:
https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.7/commit/1eece56934dda5c770bdb7fec67021222b705629

Right, seems that file (LICENSE-MODEL) never actually got applied (only LICENSE is currently in the repo), and Prohibited Uses #2 conflicts with the GPL, so would make MiniMax useless for contributing to most free software projects, for example. I think they must be using the model to vibe-code these licenses.

They should just use "GNU Affero General Public License v3 only": that covers their main commercial SaaS usage concern, is probably MORE safe for them in terms of derivative models, and it's a tried and tested license, written by experts with decades of experience in copyright licensing.

Hello everyone,
As I mentioned on X, we're trying to use a new license to find a balance between open-source values and business sustainability. https://x.com/RyanLeeMiniMax/status/2043573044065820673
I want to be straightforward with you: there has been real internal disagreement over whether this project should be open-sourced at all. Not everyone at MiniMax was on board. I spent a lot of effort pushing for it, and what you see today — the weights, the model card, this license — is the result of that push. It's the best outcome I could get.
I'll be the first to admit the license isn't perfect, and I agree it shouldn't be called a "modified MIT license." That was a poor choice of framing on our part. I already changed.
But here's what it actually says:

Personal use: completely free, no strings attached.
Enterprise use: not necessarily paid — it depends on how you use it. We just ask that you reach out to api@minimax.io so we can talk.
I'm reading every comment in this thread, and I hear the frustration. What I'd ask in return is this: if the community response to an imperfect-but-genuine attempt at openness is mass backlash, it becomes very hard for me to go back internally and argue for the next open release. The people who didn't want to open-source this in the first place will point to this thread and say "see?"

I'd rather we work through the rough edges together. If there are specific clauses that block a legitimate use case you care about, tell me — I'll take it back to the team.
That's more productive for both sides than "this isn't real open source" as a full stop.

Thanks for being open about how much you had to push for this internally. Regardless of the license drama, I really appreciate you and the team putting in the work to make the model open-weight. Any step that gets AI closer to being locally accessible is a win. 🤗

Hello everyone,
As I mentioned on X, we're trying to use a new license to find a balance between open-source values and business sustainability. https://x.com/RyanLeeMiniMax/status/2043573044065820673
I want to be straightforward with you: there has been real internal disagreement over whether this project should be open-sourced at all. Not everyone at MiniMax was on board. I spent a lot of effort pushing for it, and what you see today — the weights, the model card, this license — is the result of that push. It's the best outcome I could get.
I'll be the first to admit the license isn't perfect, and I agree it shouldn't be called a "modified MIT license." That was a poor choice of framing on our part. I already changed.
But here's what it actually says:

Personal use: completely free, no strings attached.
Enterprise use: not necessarily paid — it depends on how you use it. We just ask that you reach out to api@minimax.io so we can talk.
I'm reading every comment in this thread, and I hear the frustration. What I'd ask in return is this: if the community response to an imperfect-but-genuine attempt at openness is mass backlash, it becomes very hard for me to go back internally and argue for the next open release. The people who didn't want to open-source this in the first place will point to this thread and say "see?"

I'd rather we work through the rough edges together. If there are specific clauses that block a legitimate use case you care about, tell me — I'll take it back to the team.
That's more productive for both sides than "this isn't real open source" as a full stop.

The problem is the sketchy license. If you are closed, say it. If you are not, say it. This let's play both sides is where the problem lies and why people are upset. I'm sure a lot of us will be upset of the weights became closed as well. A lot of us running mid range gpus (~200-400G vram) love minimax because it is one of the best options at this size. But being unsure if our use case is acceptable to a inconclusive license because we may potentially make one cent is unacceptable. I would love for the weights to be remain open, I really like your model, but the indecisiveness means I may need to seek other options "just to be sure".

Very much appreciate the transparency, Ryan. Thank you and the minimax team for releasing the weights, and looking forward to working through the rough edges together.

Hello everyone,
As I mentioned on X, we're trying to use a new license to find a balance between open-source values and business sustainability. https://x.com/RyanLeeMiniMax/status/2043573044065820673

Thanks for trying to clear this up.

What did change is the commercial side. And the honest reason is this: over the last few releases, we've watched a pattern repeat itself. Our model name shows up on a hosted endpoint somewhere. Someone tries it, the quality is noticeably worse than what we actually shipped — quantized too aggressively, wrong template, silently swapped, sometimes just… not really our model. They walk away thinking MiniMax is mid. We get the reputational bill, the user gets a bad experience, and the serious hosting providers who do the work properly get drowned out in the noise.

If that's what MiniMax are trying to solve for, then I think they should be doing the opposite: not worrying about copyright at all, not demanding that people credit MiniMax when using it in a service, but worrying about the "MiniMax" trademark, and demanding that people DON'T use that trademark, unless it's served in a way that meets your standards (maybe Q8+, full context length, time to first token <= x ms, tps >= y , etc.)

I want to be straightforward with you: there has been real internal disagreement over whether this project should be open-sourced at all. Not everyone at MiniMax was on board.

This is exactly the kind of two-faced company shenanigans that that requires a clear, up to date license, rather than a bad "old" license and promises from one person in the company who may or may not have enough authority to interpret the legalese.

I spent a lot of effort pushing for it, and what you see today — the weights, the model card, this license — is the result of that push. It's the best outcome I could get.

Very much appreciated :)

I'll be the first to admit the license isn't perfect, and I agree it shouldn't be called a "modified MIT license." That was a poor choice of framing on our part. I already changed.
But here's what it actually says:

Personal use: completely free, no strings attached.

This is NOT "what it actually says". The words of the ACTUAL license matter, and the actual license would prohibit many personal use cases in my reading of it (see above).

Enterprise use: not necessarily paid — it depends on how you use it. We just ask that you reach out to api@minimax.io so we can talk.
I'm reading every comment in this thread, and I hear the frustration. What I'd ask in return is this: if the community response to an imperfect-but-genuine attempt at openness is mass backlash, it becomes very hard for me to go back internally and argue for the next open release.

The people who didn't want to open-source this in the first place will point to this thread and say "see?"

Would suggest forget about the license or now -- get everyone at MiniMax aligned on the business model, THEN talk to software copyright lawyer with experience of open source and copyleft licenses... the actual license should be the easy part, once you (as an organisation) know what you want. I'd recommend talking to the Free Software Foundation, if you're sure that you genuinely want an open license, and want their guidance: they will even understand and support the commercial needs, I'm sure; that's NOT against GPL philosophy.

The problem is the sketchy license. If you are closed, say it. If you are not, say it. This let's play both sides is where the problem lies

There is a grain of truth to this. You can't be "open" and "closed" at the same time. I'm sure you have the best of intentions, but there's a kind of intellectual self-deception here, perhaps, when claiming it's "open", ... but closed for (a) and (b) and (c)...".

I would recommend:

• Develop the business plan
• Develop the marketing plan
• IF the business and/or marketing plan includes being part of an open community -- people caring about your release on huggingface, talking about your release on r/localllama, seriously discussing it in the same breath as "open" model s like Qwen, dev'ing/testing with it for free and later possibly going to a paid hosted instance of it for production -- then you need a FULL open license, no exceptions: that means GPL (likely v3), Affero GPL (likely v3), MIT, CC, or 2 clause BSD, or Apache, or anther FSF-approved copyleft-compatible license which does NOT require attribution, essentially. Not 3 clause, not "modified", not CC-BY, etc. Then you DUAL-license it, for commercial use IN PRODUCTION only, probably beyond 50 employees, or maybe beyond 1M tokens per hour, or something like that. Below that, it's chickenfeed, not worth fighting for: you can scrape up most of those smaller PRODUCTION uses just by providing official, production servers for the model and charging per token, both directly and through services like openrouter: people will use it because it's the official instance, and they trust you to know how to run it best.
• You MUST NOT place ANY restrictions on usage of the OUTPUT from running the model, if you want your license to in any way count as "open". If you do, it's not even useful for bugfixing open source as hobby thing on weekends: your license terms would "infect" any code it generates, forever.

@ryanlee-dev -- thank you for the effort you put into it. I know it must not have been easy.

That said, I think to @JoeSmith245 's point above - the core of the license is still the same, it prohibits all commerical use. Contacting api@minimax.io is prohibition that requires an exception. The effect this has is that it's unusable in commercial environments for any reason - API serving, code generation, anything.

If the concern is truly that there are a bunch of halfass API providers out there serving 2 bit quants at low tps and calling it MiniMax, then y'all need to be enforcing your trademark (again as @JoeSmith245 rightfully pointed out).

Right now there's a disconnect with what you're saying and what LICENSE actually states. Even personal use does, indeed, have "strings attached". All of the 5 listed activities are prohibited even for personal use. In addition, attribution notice is required, as is branding.

I really appreciate what you're trying to do, but it seems like the company is trying to thread a needle of open vs closed, and it's really just not working.

For the record, I think truly open will make your brand and the model stronger. It'll drive more adoption. I think going down the path of protecting the "MiniMax" name use in commercial applications (particularly API serving) would be much more favorable to you (and the company) and prevent customer confusion in terms of whether or not they're getting the full MiniMax experience.

Just my $0.02.

The effect this has is that it's unusable in commercial environments for any reason - API serving, code generation, anything.

Again, it's worse: this affects ANY software, AT ALL, that could EVER be used in a commercial environment. i.e., you think you're using this model on the weekend to fix a bug in your Linux graphics driver because you want to play nethack without glitches. You submit the patch to linux. Linux deploys to android, google cloud servers, amazon cloud servers, oracle cloud servers, may companies... now linux itself contains illegal code, because you violated the commercial minimax license. That's a sh-tstorm, in principle. Maybe never caught, but if everyone's acting in good faith, you can't do it, and it's this license that's creating such a messy sh-tstorm.

The effect this has is that it's unusable in commercial environments for any reason - API serving, code generation, anything.

Again, it's worse: this affects ANY software, AT ALL, that could EVER be used in a commercial environment. i.e., you think you're using this model on the weekend to fix a bug in your Linux graphics driver because you want to play nethack without glitches. You submit the patch to linux. Linux deploys to android, google cloud servers, amazon cloud servers, oracle cloud servers, may companies... now linux itself contains illegal code, because you violated the commercial minimax license.

Indeed, that is the logical conclusion based on the text of LICENSE.