# The Decoder — MiniMax M3.1 Flash shows China's AI price race has no floor in sight

- Company: The Decoder (the-decoder.com)
- Announced: 2026-10-19T18:22:30+00:00
- Category: new-model
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: models
- Source: https://the-decoder.com/minimax-m3-1-flash-shows-chinas-ai-price-race-has-no-floor-in-sight/
- Record: https://forck.live/items/24705-minimax-m3-1-flash-shows-china-s-ai-price-race-has-no-floor-in-sight
- Subject: Reporting
- Open weights: yes
- Models affected: M3.1 Flash, M3, GLM-5.3-Flash, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Deepseek V4.1 Flash 1017
- Context window: one million tokens
- Pricing: API pricing sits at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, with cached inputs at $0.015

MiniMax has released M3.1 Flash, a reasoning model that scores 42 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, 13 points above its predecessor M3 at less than half the cost per task. The model ties with GLM-5.3-Flash, edges past Gemini 3.8 Flash (41) and trails Deepseek V4.1 Flash 1017 (45). According to Artificial Analysis, it hits 48 percent on Humanity's Last Exam, 22 percent on the CritPt research physics benchmark and 56 percent on the AA-Omniscience factual-accuracy test, but shows a 93 percent hallucination rate because it answers every question rather than declining when uncertain. The model handles up to one million tokens of context and accepts text and images. API pricing is $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, with cached inputs at $0.015, and the API is live at platform.minimax.io. MiniMax says M3.1 Flash runs three times faster than M3 and plans to release the model as open weights on October 23.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://the-decoder.com/minimax-m3-1-flash-shows-chinas-ai-price-race-has-no-floor-in-sight/:

> The model handles up to one million tokens of context and accepts both text and images. API pricing sits at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, with cached inputs at $0.015.

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