The API came first, the weights three days later
H3 was announced on 31 July as an API-only product and the weights followed on 3 August. The gap is short enough to be a plan rather than a change of heart.
MiniMax announced H3 on 31 July as an API product. Three days later the weights were on Hugging Face. That sequence is worth pausing on, because it is becoming a house style rather than an accident.
A three-day gap is not a lab reconsidering. It is a launch with two stages: capture the coverage and the first integrations while you are the only source, then release the weights and capture the credibility. Both audiences get served, in the order that maximises each.
What it costs is the thing "open" used to buy — independent verification at the moment of the claim. For three days, every benchmark figure in circulation came from the party being benchmarked. Nobody could check.
The pattern to watch is whether the gap grows. Three days is a rounding error. Three months is an entirely different product strategy wearing the same word, and there is no announcement when the number changes.
Paired with a licence reported to exclude four major jurisdictions, the release tells you the field has stopped having one definition of open and started having several, each shaped to a business.
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