The Pulse
MiniMax Launches M3.1 Flash With 70% Lower Agentic-Task Costs
MiniMax says M3.1 Flash cuts usage costs for agentic tasks by 70% and makes online inference nearly three times faster. The company also lists API prices and reports benchmark results across coding, computer use and cybersecurity.
AI.info Team · Written with AI · fact-checked ·
MiniMax launched M3.1 Flash on October 19 with a sharp cost claim: agentic tasks, the company says, cost 70% less than they did with its predecessor. But its announcement gives fixed prices per million tokens without explaining the workload or calculation behind that broader comparison. The release pairs the savings claim with benchmark scores and a speed claim, all published by MiniMax.
MiniMax sets API rates at $0.15 per million input tokens
The company lists M3.1 Flash at $0.15 per million input tokens, $0.60 per million output tokens and $0.015 per million cached input tokens. Those are the model’s stated API rates; they are not, by themselves, a breakdown of the 70% reduction in total agentic-task costs. MiniMax does not specify a reference task or show how it calculated that overall comparison in the announcement.
“For agentic tasks, the model’s overall usage cost is 70% lower than its predecessor.”
MiniMax, the company
MiniMax also says M3.1 Flash makes online inference nearly three times faster. It reports output speeds reaching more than 200 tokens per second in everyday use, with median speeds consistently above 170 tokens per second. The post attributes the efficiency improvements to more aggressive sparsity, but does not give a test setup for the speed figures.
Benchmark scores cover coding, computer use and security
MiniMax reports a score of 73.7% on DeepSWE v1.1, a benchmark for complex software tasks, and 76.2 on BankerToolBench, which it describes as testing multi-step planning and chained tool calls. On computer-use evaluations, the model scores 61.7 on OSWorld V2 and 29.6 on Agents’ Last Exam. MiniMax says those results rank it first among Chinese models on both benchmarks.
The company also reports an 82% score on CyberGym, which evaluates vulnerability discovery and validation. It says internal security experts tested the model on code auditing, vulnerability patching, penetration testing, malware analysis and reverse engineering. Those cybersecurity findings are MiniMax’s account of its own evaluations; the announcement does not provide further testing detail in its text.
Space Bunny was an early M3.1 Flash version
The launch identifies Space Bunny, an anonymously operated model that MiniMax says processed more than 200 trillion tokens, as an early version of M3.1 Flash. That disclosure connects the release to a model that had been used before MiniMax publicly named it. The company does not give a date range or additional operational details for Space Bunny in the announcement.
API and product access start now; weights come later
M3.1 Flash is available through the MiniMax API, M Plan and MiniMax Code, according to the company. MiniMax says it will release the model weights later, without giving a date in the launch post. It also says a Pro model will arrive later, positioning Flash as the current release in a pair of models with different performance aims.