MiniMax Releases M2.5 — Claims Sonnet-Level at 1/20th Cost

VentureBeat·medium signal

Chinese lab MiniMax launched M2.5, calling it "the first production-level model designed natively for Agent scenarios," claiming to match Claude Sonnet at 1/20th cost. They say 30% of internal tasks and 80% of new code commits are handled by M2.5. Trained using proprietary RL framework called Forge. Weights not yet publicly released despite "open source" claims — license terms remain undisclosed. Treat with appropriate skepticism until independent benchmarks confirm.