MiniMax H3’s community license excludes four major markets

MiniMax put the base weights for its new H3 video model on Hugging Face this weekend. The files are public. Permission to use them is not global, and the full product is not in the repository.

The first border is geographic. The MiniMax H3 Community License defines its “Applicable Territory” as the world except the European Union, United Kingdom, South Korea and United States. Its rights to use, modify and distribute H3 are granted only inside that territory.

People and organizations in the four excluded markets can ask MiniMax for a separate license. Even elsewhere, a commercial product or service generating more than $20 million in yearly revenue needs prior written authorization. The agreement also says H3 works, outputs and results may not be used outside the applicable territory.

That is a much narrower fact than “H3 is open.” A developer in Brazil can receive a broad, royalty-free grant under the community license. A developer in Boston cannot rely on that same grant merely because Hugging Face serves the same files to both. The download page answers where the bytes are; the license answers what someone may legally do with them.

MiniMax says the split is about control. Its license Q&A says the hosted API remains globally available because MiniMax controls the infrastructure and can enforce safeguards. Self-hosted weights can be modified and redistributed beyond its infrastructure, which makes compliance harder.

The company points to changing rules around generated likenesses, copyright and content safety in the four excluded markets, as well as copyright litigation involving generative video in the US. This is MiniMax’s stated rationale, not proof that those jurisdictions require this exact license design. The practical effect is clear: MiniMax keeps case-by-case control over self-hosted deployment in several of the world’s largest AI markets while continuing to offer hosted access there.

The second border is technical. MiniMax describes H3 as a three-part system: a hosted component that interprets complex prompts, the H3-Base model that generates 768p audio and video, and a regeneration component that produces 2K output. The model card at the pinned August 3 repository revision says the base weights are released, but the prompt-processing component is not included and the 2K regeneration component is not yet open-sourced. The official full-resolution workflow combines a locally deployed base model with MiniMax API calls.

This is still a meaningful release. Researchers and developers in the licensed territory can inspect, run, modify and fine-tune the 33-billion-parameter base model. They have custody of an important artifact that was unavailable when MiniMax announced H3 on July 31 .

But “open-weight” should begin the audit, not end it. Ask which files arrived, where the license applies, which parts still call home and what extra permission commercial use requires.

What to watch. MiniMax says the territorial restriction means “not yet,” not “not ever,” and promises to communicate future license changes. The next evidence is whether it expands the licensed territory and releases the two hosted pieces—not how many times the public files are called open.

Source graph: Semble source collection