MiniMax’s new open M2.5 and M2.5 Lightning near state-of-the-art while costing 1/20th of Claude Opus 4.6
Publish Date: 2026-02-13 02:51:00
Source Domain: venturebeat.com
Chinese AI startup MiniMax, headquartered in Shanghai, has sent shockwaves through the AI industry today with the release of its new M2.5 language model in two variants, which promise to make high-end artificial intelligence so cheap you might stop worrying about the bill entirely.
It was made open source on Hugging Face under a modified MIT License requiring that those using the model (or custom variants) for commercial purposes “prominently display ‘MiniMax M2.5’ on the user interface of such product or service.”
But that’s almost beside the point given how cheap MiniMax is serving it through its API and those of partners.
For the last few years, using the world’s most powerful AI was like hiring an expensive consultant—it was brilliant, but you watched the clock (and the token count) constantly. M2.5 changes that math, dropping the cost of the frontier by as much as 95%.
By delivering performance that rivals the top-tier models from Google and Anthropic at a fraction of the cost, particularly in agentic tool use for enterprise tasks, including creating Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, MiniMax is betting that the future isn’t just about how smart a model is, but how often you can afford to use it.
Indeed, to this end, MiniMax says it worked “with senior professionals in fields such as finance, law, and social sciences” to ensure the model could perform real work up to their specifications and standards.
This release matters because it signals a shift from AI as a “chatbot” to AI as a “worker”. When intelligence becomes “too cheap to meter,” developers stop building simple Q&A tools and start building “agents”—software that can spend hours autonomously coding, researching, and organizing complex projects without breaking the bank.
In fact, MiniMax has already deployed this model into its own operations. Currently, 30% of all tasks at MiniMax HQ are completed by M2.5, and a staggering 80% of their newly committed code is generated by M2.5!
As the…
