The leaderboard's mystery 'Space Bunny' was MiniMax all along

MiniMax launched M3.1 Flash on October 19 and confirmed that Space Bunny, the anonymous model that had been topping leaderboards, was an early version of the new release all along. The company describes M3.1 Flash as a next-generation Flash model with a generational leap in agentic tasks, coding, computer use and cybersecurity, with online inference nearly three times faster and usage costs reduced by about 70%.

The reveal closed weeks of speculation about the unnamed model's identity. MiniMax greeted it with a launch post featuring a carrot-shaped rocket and the message Welcome back, Space Bunny, and said the stealth period's user feedback directly shaped the shipped model. OpenRouter, which hosted the anonymous run, is offering M3.1 Flash free for 72 hours from launch.