MiniMax

China1 model on Stav

MiniMax is a Shanghai-headquartered AI lab, recently listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, that releases a mix of openly-licensed and custom-restricted model weights. It sits outside direct US CLOUD Act jurisdiction, but as a China-incorporated company it is subject to Chinese data and national-security law, and in 2026 Anthropic publicly identified MiniMax as running the largest of several Chinese 'distillation attack' campaigns against Claude, using thousands of fraudulent accounts and, per later Anthropic disclosures, a shell-company proxy network. MiniMax has not signed the EU AI Act's GPAI Code of Practice and shows no visible EU legal entity, DPA, or EU-specific data-residency commitments, which raises governance and compliance questions for regulated European customers.