A practical notice for app maintainers
Migration briefing, checked October 19: MiniMax’s global and Chinese FAQs carry an M2.5/M2.7 retirement notice. It does not establish a new-model announcement today.
An API connects an app to a model. This notice is for AI geeks and experienced technicians maintaining those connections.
Your billing plan changes the migration path
For M Plan and Token Plan users, the notice says M2.5/M2.7 requests automatically route to M3.1 Flash from October 19. Existing model names remain compatible and plan usage allowances stay unchanged.
For pay-as-you-go API users, the notice sets October 19, 2026 as the new-user cutoff and November 18 as retirement. It says existing users can continue until retirement; requests to these models will then stop working.
The source leaves an important uncertainty
Both FAQs also place these model families in a table labeled retired, which conflicts with the notice’s dated schedule. Neither provides the notice’s original publication date or an exact changeover hour or timezone. Confirm your account’s current status with MiniMax rather than assuming a specific switchover time. We have not tested account access or routing.
Our take
R2’s editorial analysis: first inventory the model names your app calls and identify its billing plan. A compatible name can hide a change in the model doing the work; compatibility does not establish identical behavior.
Before your migration deadline, compare representative prompts, tool responses, and error handling with the replacement. Check the outputs your app actually depends on, including formatting and failure paths, and keep a recoverable configuration. Ordinary readers using unrelated chat apps do not need to change anything on the strength of this notice.