Hailuo AI

Six engineers. Six hundred million dollars in backing. And a text-to-video tool that within months of launch was generating cinematic clips good enough to unsettle Hollywood studios.

Hailuo AI launched in March 2024 as MiniMax's flagship consumer video product, built on proprietary diffusion-based video models trained in-house by a company that had spent two years quietly building multimodal foundation model infrastructure from scratch. By the end of 2025, Hailuo's models had powered the creation of over 600 million videos globally—a staggering output for a tool that requires no editing experience whatsoever.

What Makes It Different

Hailuo AI distinguishes itself through its Director Mode—a feature that lets users specify precise camera movements, angles, and transitions entirely through text prompts, effectively democratizing cinematography techniques previously requiring years of training. Combined with a physics engine capable of simulating water, cloth, and collision dynamics with near-photorealistic accuracy, the platform routinely outperforms tools costing ten times as much per generation. Independent benchmarks positioned Hailuo 02 and 2.3 in the global top tier for video generation quality-to-cost ratio.

The platform now encompasses text-to-video, image-to-video, subject reference (maintaining consistent character identity across scenes), a Media Agent for one-click multi-modal content pipelines, TTS with 300+ voices, voice cloning from a 10-second sample, and image generation—all from a single browser tab or mobile app. Its parent MiniMax reported over 5.6 million monthly active users on Hailuo AI specifically by late 2025, with paying subscribers driving a 143% year-over-year revenue surge in AI-native products.

"We hope that Hailuo can be an all-powerful creative assistant and a pioneer of innovation and change, allowing inspiration to take shape—and then transcend all forms." — MiniMax, October 2025

Not without controversy: in September 2025, Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery filed a copyright lawsuit alleging that Hailuo AI's models had been trained on and could reproduce their protected characters. The case remains ongoing and has become a landmark test of AI video liability in the United States.