China’s MiniMax Says New AI Model Cheaper and Faster Than Claude

The AI upstart backed by Alibaba and Tencent is open-sourcing its latest large language model, MiniMax M2, that it says only costs a fraction of what Anthropic is charging for Claude Sonnet, according to a MiniMax post on X.

• M2 is about 2 times faster compared to Claude Sonnet: post
• NOTE: In September, Anthropic said it is blocking its services from Chinese-controlled companies, citing national security concerns
• M2 outperforms domestic peers from startups including DeepSeek, MoonShot AI, and Zhipu in several benchmarks while trailing Claude Sonnet 4.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5 in some of those tests: post
• The company is offering ...