Why MiniMax M2.5 is the most popular model on OpenRouter right now
Blog post from WorkOS
MiniMax M2.5, an open-weight Mixture of Experts model with 230 billion parameters, has emerged as the most-used AI model on OpenRouter due to its efficiency and cost-effectiveness, processing over 2.45 trillion tokens in a week as of February 2026. Despite only activating 10 billion parameters per inference, M2.5 is capable of handling most conversational tasks, coding across languages, and office productivity, making it a preferred choice for AI interactions due to its low cost compared to models like Claude Opus 4.6. While it excels in speed and general-purpose tasks, M2.5 falls short in deep reasoning and math-heavy applications, where models like Claude Opus and GPT-5.2 are superior. Its open-weight nature, released under a modified MIT license, allows users to run, customize, and deploy it without API dependency, enhancing cost predictability and reliability. The model's rise illustrates a shift in the AI landscape, suggesting a tiered approach where M2.5 manages routine tasks, reserving complex tasks for more specialized models, thereby significantly reducing operational costs.