On October 19, MiniMax officially rolled out M3.1 Flash — and unmasked a mystery in the process: Space Bunny Alpha, the anonymous model that ran on OpenRouter and topped OpenCode's chart for 12 consecutive days, was an early version of it, processing more than 200 trillion tokens while unnamed. That is the real story: the model proved itself on real workloads before claiming its brand.

The numbers, all vendor-reported

Per the official blog, M3.1 Flash posts 73.7% on DeepSWE v1.1 (software engineering), 61.7 on OSWorld V2 and 29.6 on Agents' Last Exam (MiniMax says both rank first among Chinese models), 82% on CyberGym, and 76.2 on BankerToolBench. Inference is claimed to be nearly 3x faster online via "more aggressive sparsity," with 200+ TPS output and a P50 of 170+ TPS. CellCog's read of the release post also notes a 1M-token context.

Pricing and openness

Flat pricing is $0.15 per million input tokens, $0.60 output, and $0.015 cached; MiniMax claims a 70% drop in overall agent-task cost versus the predecessor. Access is via the MiniMax API, M Plan, and MiniMax Code. The blog only says weights arrive "later"; CellCog reads October 23 from the release post. Until then, "open" remains a promise.

The cold water

Two independent signals. First, CellCog's comparison table shows M3.1 Flash is not uniformly ahead: on DeepSWE v1.1, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash reports 77.0 and Opus 5 reports 74.0, both above its 73.7; on Terminal Bench 4.0 it trails Opus 5 (38.1 vs 51.8). Second, early hands-on feedback is lukewarm: one developer wrote on X that for everyday coding in OpenCode it "still feels weaker than GLM-5.3 Flash," and another reported it stalling on long tool-call chains — "cheap per token means nothing if the session dies at step 40." OpenCode's own account disclosed Space Bunny held its #1 spot for 12 days, serving 106 trillion tokens.

So what

The anonymous-first, reveal-later playbook swaps benchmark credibility for something harder to fake: 200 trillion tokens of real usage. But the vendor-reported scores have not been independently rerun, and whether the anonymous endpoint matches the official API is unverified. When the weights land — October 23, if on schedule — run DeepSWE yourself; that is the real acceptance test.

Refs: MiniMax blog https://www.minimax.io/blog/minimax-m31f ; CellCog analysis https://cellcog.ai/blog/minimax-m3-1-flash