MiniMax-M2.1 vs Claude Sonnet 4.5
API pricing, benchmark indices and specs — updated 19 October 2026.
anthropic · B · API-only
Input / 1M
$3.00
Output / 1M
$15.00
AA index
20.7
proprietary · 1M context
Specification comparison
Differences are highlighted; identical values are muted.
| Specification | MiniMax-M2.1 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Open weights · also via API | API-only (closed weights) |
| Parameters | 228.7 B | n/a — API-only |
| Architecture | MiniMaxM2ForCausalLM | n/a — API-only |
| Context length | 196,608 | 1,000,000 |
| Licence | other | Proprietary |
| Commercial use | Unknown | Per API terms |
| Languages | — | n/a — API-only |
| Downloads 30d | 11,542 | n/a — API-only |
| Downloads all time | 505 K | n/a — API-only |
| Quantizations on the Hub | SAFETENSORS | n/a — API-only |
| Gated | No | n/a — API-only |
| First seen on the Hub | 2025-12-20 | n/a — API-only |
| API input price / 1M tokens | $0.30 | $3.00 |
| API output price / 1M tokens | $1.20 | $15.00 |
| Est. cost per 1M input + 1M output tokens | $1.50 | $18.00 |
| Cached input / 1M tokens | $0.03 | $0.30 |
| AA Intelligence Index | 20.9 | 20.7 |
| AA Coding Index | — | 52.1 |
| AA Agentic Index | — | 15.8 |
| Max output tokens | 131,072 | 64,000 |
| API providers | 1 | 5 |
| Tool calling | Yes | Yes |
| Reasoning mode | Yes | Yes |
API cost
Estimated cost of 1M input + 1M output tokens via OpenRouter
MiniMax-M2.1
$1.50
Claude Sonnet 4.5
$18.00
MiniMax-M2.1 is 12.0× cheaper at list price.
VRAM side by side
On RTX 4090 · 24 GB · 8K context unless noted
MiniMax-M2.1 · fp16 @ 192K ctx
1,076.9 GB / 24 GB