MiniMax launches H3 video model with 2K native-audio clips, undercuts rivals on price
AI video model releases
MiniMax launches H3 video model with 2K native-audio clips, undercuts rivals on price
MiniMax H3 launched July 31, 2026 as the successor to the Hailuo video line, generating 2K clips of 4 to 15 seconds with natively synced dialogue, ambience, and music in one generation pass.
Pricing is pay-as-you-go at $0.13/sec for 2K (a 15-second clip costs $1.95 before add-ons), which MiniMax claims is under a third of mainstream rivals' cost for 2K output; a $0.09/sec 768P tier exists only in closed beta.
H3 supports omni-reference generation from up to 12 files (9 images, 3 videos, 3 audio clips), plus instruction-based editing and motion transfer between videos per Reuters.
H3 launched the same day as ByteDance's Seedance 2.5, intensifying China's AI-video pricing competition, but H3's model weights are only promised "within days" and had not appeared on MiniMax's Hugging Face org as of publication.
H3 is unrelated to MiniMax's M3 language model released in June; MiniMax never brands H3 as "Hailuo 3.0" despite that community nickname circulating on launch day.
cho.sh