Side-by-side comparison of Grok-2 (xAI · USA) and MiniMax-M2.7 (MiniMax AI · China) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Grok-2 is rated conditional; MiniMax-M2.7 is blocked. They part ways on licence: Grok-2 is "Grok 2 Community", MiniMax-M2.7 is "MiniMax Non-Commercial License".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional xAI's first open-weights release. Commercial use allowed under the Grok 2 Community License with xAI's Acceptable Use Policy. Notable restriction: weights cannot be used to train other models (distillation ban). 500GB model, needs 8 GPUs with 40GB+. | Blocked Per current documentation, the MiniMax Non-Commercial License prohibits commercial deployment without individually negotiated written authorization from MiniMax, making the weights unsuitable for EU commercial workloads out-of-the-box. Opaque training data and Shanghai-based publisher compound the EU AI Act and data-transfer gaps. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-16 | 2026-04-17 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Grok 2 Community | MiniMax Non-Commercial License |
| Commercial use | Yes (w/ AUP) | Non-commercial only |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Undisclosed |
| Origin | USA | China (Shanghai) |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 14/100 | 50/100 |
| Speed | — | 46 tok/s |
| Blended price | — | $0.53/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.