MiniMax's open-source M2.5 hits frontier coding levels

Chinese AI lab MiniMax launched M2.5, an open-source model that rivals Opus 4.6 and GPT-5 on agentic coding benchmarks — but at a fraction of the cost, making it cheap enough to power AI agents running around the clock.

M2.5 shows especially strong coding performance, scoring roughly even with Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.2 across key development benchmarks.

Two APIs are available: a faster M2.5-Lightning ($2.40/M output) and a standard M2.5 ($1.20/M output), both priced much lower than Opus ($25/M).

MiniMax revealed that M2.5 now handles 30% of daily company tasks across R&D, product, sales, HR, and finance, as well as 80% of new code commits.

The models are available via API, though the open-source weights and license have yet to be published.