Open weights you are not licensed to run where you live
MiniMax published H3's weights on 3 August under a community licence — royalty-free for research and commercial use, and reported to exclude the United States, European Union, United Kingdom and South Korea.
MiniMax put the weights of H3, its omni-modal video model, on Hugging Face on 3 August under the MiniMax H3 Community Licence. Royalty-free, research and commercial use permitted. Then the territorial clause: coverage of the licence reports that it does not authorise use in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom or South Korea.
On that reading the prohibition is not narrow. It is described as covering using, running, modifying, distributing and hosting the model — and using its outputs — inside those territories. If accurate, a studio in London cannot legally put an H3 clip in an advertisement.
Two caveats belong in the same breath. This is secondary coverage of the licence text rather than the text itself, and licence interpretation is the sort of thing that gets revised. Anyone planning around it should read the licence, not this article.
If it holds, it inverts what "open weights" has meant for three years. The usual restriction was commercial: free for research, pay us at scale. This one is geographic, and it happens to exclude the jurisdictions with the most active AI regulation. A licence that excludes exactly the places with enforcement regimes is either a compliance decision or a market decision, and from outside they look identical.
It also complicates the scoreboard. When the strongest open-weight video model cannot be used by a large share of the people counting open-weight models, "open" is doing less work than the word suggests.
MiniMax — Open General Intelligence: MiniMax H3 Is Now Open Source → · Topview — MiniMax H3 Open Source: What's Free vs API → · RunPod — MiniMax H3: The Open-Weight Omni-Modal Video Model, and What It Takes to Run It →