Several open video models exclude UK users by licence, outputs included

Most of our licence coverage is about commercial conditions: whether you can use a model in a product, and on what terms. This is a different and sharper case. There are prominent open-weight models that a reader in the United Kingdom is not licensed to use at all, and the restriction extends to what the model produces, not only to the weights. If you are in the UK, this is worth understanding before you download anything on the strength of the word “open”.

The news

MiniMax H3 is an open-weight, omni-modal model released to Hugging Face in early August 2026. It understands text, images, video, and audio, and generates video with synchronised stereo audio, at up to 2K resolution and up to 15 seconds. It has been widely shared and repackaged, with community GGUF builds and ComfyUI integrations, and it is not large: the core is a 33-billion-parameter model, and quantised builds bring the weights themselves down to roughly 8.5GB to 20GB depending on the level, though you also load a separate Qwen3-VL text and vision encoder alongside it, roughly 12GB to 17GB as a GGUF. Those figures are approximate and depend on the build. In hardware terms, it is well within reach of a single consumer card.

The hardware is not the constraint. The licence is. Read at source, the MiniMax H3 licence defines its “Applicable Territory” as worldwide, excluding the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea, and the United States of America, and states: “You may not use, reproduce, modify, distribute, or display the MiniMax H3 Works or any of their Outputs or results outside the Applicable Territory.” In plain terms, a UK user is not licensed to run the model, and is not licensed to use what it generates either. Separately, the licence requires anyone who does use it to display “MiniMax H3” in their product’s interface, and requires organisations above 20 million US dollars in yearly revenue to obtain separate written authorisation. We are describing the terms, not offering a legal opinion; the point is that the terms exist and are easy to miss.

Why it matters for a UK audience

The trap here is that none of this shows up where people usually look. A model card badge, an SPDX identifier, or a headline calling something “open weights” tells you nothing about a territory clause buried in the licence body. Several widely read write-ups describe models in this category loosely, and some have called territory-restricted models “Apache 2.0” outright, which they are not. The only reliable way to know is to read the licence text, including the definition of the territory and any clause about outputs, and to check the licences of the components on the model’s inference path as well, because a permissively licensed model with a restrictively licensed dependency inherits the restriction.

For most of what this site covers, a licence condition is something to weigh. This is different: for a UK reader it is a straightforward “not licensed”, and because it reaches the outputs, it applies even to generating a single clip for use here.

It is a pattern, and it varies model by model

MiniMax H3 is not an isolated case. Tencent’s Hunyuan line has shipped several models under a near-identical exclusion of the EU, the UK, and Korea, our own catalogue entry for HunyuanVideo among the family, and reporting in September 2026 describes Tencent’s HunyuanWorld-Voyager still blocking EU and UK users on the same regulatory grounds. Yet the picture is not uniform: Tencent moved its Hunyuan 3.0 image model to a standard Apache 2.0 licence in July 2026, lifting the restriction there. So the same developer can ship one model a UK user cannot touch and another they can use freely, which is exactly why “read this licence”, not “read this developer’s usual terms”, is the right habit.

The stated rationale, in MiniMax’s case, is regulatory caution. The company points to the faster-moving rules around generative video specifically, naming the EU AI Act, UK and Korean regulation, and ongoing US litigation over generative video, and frames the restriction as “not yet” rather than “not ever”. Whether that caution proves temporary is not something we can predict. Our coverage of the EU AI Act timeline and the guides on the EU AI Act and local open models give the regulatory background, as general information rather than legal advice.

What to do about it

This is the licence-reading discipline we keep returning to, made concrete. Treat “open weights” as a description of availability, not a grant of permission. Before you build anything on an open video or media model, read the licence body for a territory definition and an outputs clause, and if you are in the UK, confirm the UK is inside the licensed territory rather than outside it. Where a model genuinely carries a global permissive licence, our catalogue records that; where it does not, the licence note is where the condition is spelled out. We flagged the licence traps in this corner when we surveyed local generative media, and this is the most consequential version of that trap: not a condition on how you use a model, but a line on the map that leaves you outside it.