MiniMax

Ten of the eleven MiniMax rows OpenRouter lists are the coding-and-agents line, from MiniMax-01 in January 2025 through M3. The eleventh is minimax/minimax-m2-her, and it is the odd one twice over. It carries a window of 65536tokensopenrouter-models, last checked 2026-09-14 where every other main-line M2 row carries 204800tokensopenrouter-models, last checked 2026-09-14, and the router's own copy calls it "a dialogue-first large language model built for immersive roleplay" rather than anything about agents or code. Four days after it was listed, MiniMax published a write-up saying what it is: the model underneath Talkie and Xingye, tuned against a hundred-turn conversation.

The write-up is the unusual part. MiniMax says that before mid-2024 its iteration cycle was "tethered to traditional online A/B testing", and that it gave that up for a reason with nothing to do with statistics — swapping the model under a long-running character was received as "a violation of the character's established voice", and users reverted or complained rather than accept the better one. What replaced it is a benchmark built on an inversion: "While 'alignment' (what makes a response great) is subjective, 'misalignment' (what makes a response wrong) is surprisingly objective." So the scoring hunts failures instead of ranking merit — reference confusion when one model is asked to voice several characters at once, physical-logic errors where two characters who have said goodbye and walked apart keep talking at normal volume, and replies that act or speak on the user's behalf. MiniMax reports M2-her first overall on that benchmark and fifth on its Stories dimension, setting against itself there Gemini's rich vocabulary, Claude's steady plot advancement and Doubao's vivid expression. A vendor placing itself fifth on a third of its own benchmark is not the usual shape of a launch post.

The small window follows from the target rather than contradicting it. MiniMax's stated failure mode for everyone else is "context bloat" — models that hit a "performance wall" after turn 20 and pad to compensate for lost focus — against which it says M2-her "maintains response length within the optimal range" across a hundred turns. A hundred disciplined turns is what 65536tokensopenrouter-models, last checked 2026-09-14 buys. A hundred bloated ones is not.

Nothing MiniMax is currently being sued over has a row on the router. Its own model menu lists six things in three groups — three text models, one video model, two for speech and music — and only the text group reaches a language-model router at all. That leaves the company's legal exposure sitting entirely on the half with no listing: the American studios' copyright suit names Hailuo, the video service, and H3's territorial carve-out governs weights the router never carried. The eleven rows are the part of MiniMax that a price-and-context table can see, and they are not where the argument about this company is happening.