MiniMax-H3 open weights are live — and the licence excludes the US, EU, UK and South Korea

MiniMax published the H3 weights on August 3. The repo carries 297 files, and the safetensors index totals 33,122,992,896 parameters — a 33B dense model, not the sparse giant its arena position might suggest. The tags confirm the full spread the launch promised: text-to-video, image-to-video, video-to-video, and both text- and image-to-audio-video.

Then there is the licence, dated August 2, 2026, and it is the part worth reading before you download anything.

Clause 3 grants rights in the "Applicable Territory", which clause 5 defines verbatim as "worldwide, excluding the Excluded Territories". Clause 5 then defines those as "the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States of America".

Read plainly: the biggest open-weight video release of the year is not licensed for use in the United States, the EU, the UK or South Korea. MiniMax invites parties in those territories to write to it for a separate licence, to be granted "based on robust controls and guardrails" for compliance with local law — so this is a gate, not a wall, but it is a gate that did not exist on any comparable release.

Two further terms matter if you get past the geography. Commercial products generating more than $20M a year in revenue need separate prior written authorisation. And the definition of "Model Derivatives" explicitly reaches distillation, intermediate representations and training on synthetic data generated by H3 — though the licence is careful to add that Outputs themselves are not derivatives, so generated video is yours.

The hosted API is unaffected. Only the weights carry the territory restriction.

A geographic carve-out driven by regulatory and litigation exposure is a new pattern in open-weight releases, and it is the kind of thing that gets omitted from the headline. If you read "open-source frontier video model" this week and are reading this from any of those four markets, the weights are not open to you yet.