Deploying MiniMax M2.1 with vLLM: Complete Guide for Agentic Workloads
If you're building agentic applications or coding assistants, you've probably noticed that most open-source models fall short on tool calling and multi-step reasoning. MiniMax M2.1 changes that. Released on December 23, 2025, it's currently the strongest open-source model for agentic workloads, matching or beating Claude Sonnet on benchmarks like tau2-Bench, BrowseComp, and GAIA.
What makes M2.1 practical to deploy is its architecture. It's a Mixture-of-Experts model with 230 billion total parameters, but only 10 billion activate per forward pass. You get frontier-class performance on tool calling and software engineering tasks while running inference at a fraction of the compute. The model is MIT-licensed and works out of the box with Cline, Roo Code, OpenCode, and Claude Code.
This guide covers vLLM deployment, benchmarking, tool calling with M2.1's interleaved thinking feature, and integration with coding terminals.