MiniMax released M3.1 Flash on October 19, 2026, and says it cuts the overall cost of agentic tasks by 70% and makes online inference nearly three times faster than M3. MiniMax lists Flash at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens.

Those are half M3’s discounted rates of $0.30 and $1.20 for requests with no more than 512K input tokens; cached input and longer M3 requests have separate rates. Online inference speed differs from the time needed to finish a tool-using task.

Artificial Analysis independently scored M3.1 Flash at 72.5% on AutomationBench-AA, a test of multi-step work across simulated business apps. That score measures the share of task objectives completed without guardrail violations. It differs from the percentage of entire tasks completed on Zapier’s own AutomationBench leaderboard.

I didn’t run AutomationBench myself. Instead, I tested M3.1 Flash against M3 on three smaller agent tasks to see how they behaved in work closer to my own. One run per task is too small a sample to measure a general improvement in accuracy, cost, or speed.

I ran both models once per test through OpenRouter, pinned to MiniMax’s own servers, at default settings. At the time of testing, I used OpenRouter’s free Flash endpoint, so the dollar amounts below for Flash are estimates at MiniMax’s list prices, not charges I paid. I didn’t use the MiniMax API directly because its credit minimum was too high for this small test. I capped the turns each model could use to complete the job.

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