On 3 August 2026 the Chinese lab MiniMax put the weights of its H3 model on Hugging Face. Freely downloadable, around 42 gigabytes, an open model. If you sit in the EU and want to run it on your own server, you still have a problem. The license does not allow it.
This is where people mix up two ideas. Open weight means the weights file is out there. It says nothing about whether you are legally permitted to run it in your jurisdiction. With H3 those two things come apart in an unusually visible way, which is what makes the case worth reading closely.
What MiniMax actually shipped
H3 is a multimodal video model with roughly 33 billion parameters according to the published card. The weights have been on Hugging Face since 3 August, and the license is dated 2 August 2026. That is the same day the next stage of the EU AI Act starts to apply, a deadline we covered separately. The download is about 42.5 gigabytes, so as a piece of compute it fits on a well specified workstation.
The limit here is not a technical one. Any competent EU shop could host a 42 gigabyte model. The wall is in the license.
The clause that matters
The H3 Community License defines an "Applicable Territory", the region where use is permitted. Based on our reading of the reported terms, four regions are explicitly carved out: the US, the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea. For those regions there is no grant to run the weights locally, to modify them, to redistribute them, or to use the outputs of a locally run H3. That is also how TechTimes summarised it when the weights landed.
If you want to work with it here anyway, you have to email MiniMax and negotiate a separate license. There is a second gate on top. Companies above roughly 20 million US dollars in annual revenue need a separate commercial grant regardless of where they sit.
MiniMax's hosted API stays reachable. That is a different legal and data-protection situation, though. Your inputs then leave the building and run through a provider in China, which defeats the point of a locally hosted model.
Why MiniMax did this
MiniMax gives two reasons. Video models sit under heavier regulatory scrutiny than plain text models, and it names the EU AI Act along with UK and Korean rules. For the US market the lab points to ongoing copyright litigation over generated video. Whether or not you find that reasoning persuasive, the outcome for an EU business is the same: no local deployment without a bespoke license.
Open weight is not open source
H3 is the sharpest current example, not the only one. Plenty of popular models arrive under a bespoke community license rather than a standard open-source one. Before you wire an open model into a product or a workflow, read three parts of the license.
- The territory. Is there a clause, like H3's, that excludes your region?
- The revenue threshold. Above what annual turnover do you need a commercial grant?
- The use bans. Some licenses rule out entire fields, such as certain biometric or military purposes.
Models under MIT or Apache 2.0 usually carry none of this. GLM-5.2, an open frontier model, ships under MIT, which we wrote about last week. With Chinese models the license deserves an especially careful look, because provenance and license often get blurred together when they are really two separate questions, something we took apart in our self-hosting piece.
How to check a license in five minutes
The effort is small and pays off before any download. On a Hugging Face model page there is only a short license tag at the top. The full terms sit as a file in the repository, usually named LICENSE or as a section of the model card.
- Open the license file itself, not just the tag. The tag often reads only community or other, while the actual contract is in the text.
- Search the document for words like Territory, Region or the name of your country. An exclusion clause is rarely hidden, but it is rarely in the first paragraph either.
- Search for revenue, turnover or a figure with the word million. That is the commercial threshold.
- Check whether the download is gated, meaning you have to accept terms before you can pull the weights. That acceptance is the contract.
If doubt remains after those five minutes, that is already an answer. The question then belongs with your legal counsel or inside a properly scoped pilot before anything production runs on top of it.
What this means for your business
For a mid-sized company the lesson is unglamorous and important at once. A model you want to run locally, to keep your data in house, has to clear two bars. It has to fit your hardware, and it has to be legally operable in your region. The second bar gets skipped often, because the word open sounds so reassuring.
H3 is out for local EU deployment until you hold a separate license. For text and documents, the most common office case, there are plenty of alternatives under clean licenses. If you are picking models right now, weigh the license with the same care you give to memory footprint. What a local setup built around data control looks like is laid out on our data sovereignty page.
Want to know which open models you may run locally in your own shop without a legal snag? In a pilot project we work through license, hardware and data flow on one concrete use case before you spend anything.
Frequently asked questions
Can I run MiniMax H3 locally inside the EU?
Based on our reading of the published license, not without a separate grant. The H3 Community License leaves the EU, the US, the UK and South Korea out of its permitted territory. To run it locally in the EU you would need to contact MiniMax and negotiate a separate license.
Is open weight the same as open source?
No. Open weight only means the weights file is publicly downloadable. Whether you are allowed to run, modify or redistribute it is decided by the license, which can exclude regions, revenue tiers or whole use cases.
What should I check in an open model's license?
Three things: whether a territory clause excludes your region, above what annual revenue you need a commercial grant, and whether specific use cases are banned. Models under MIT or Apache 2.0 usually carry none of these limits.
Can I at least use H3 through the hosted API?
The MiniMax API stays available, but it is a different case. Your inputs leave the building and travel through a provider in China, which is exactly the path a locally run model is meant to avoid.