Chinese AI company MiniMax restricts open-source use of video generation model "H3" in the US, Europe, and South Korea

TechFlow News, August 5, according to Yonhap News Agency citing Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, Chinese AI company MiniMax has listed the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and South Korea as "excluded regions" for its video generation model "H3". Users in the aforementioned regions must apply for a formal license separately and obtain approval before use, while users in most other countries can directly download and freely use, copy, modify, and distribute. MiniMax stated that this move is not targeted at specific countries, but reflects the more complex and rapidly changing regulatory environment faced by video generation models, involving areas such as human image generation, copyright, and content safety.

Currently, Hollywood giants such as Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery have filed lawsuits against MiniMax for unauthorized use of copyrighted content to train AI models. The US court rejected MiniMax's application to withdraw the lawsuit in May this year, and the case is pending. H3 officially released model weights on August 3, supporting the generation of videos up to 15 seconds long with 2K resolution, and ranked first on the video editing leaderboard of the benchmark platform Artificial Analysis.