Hailuo AI got good before most people had heard of it. Sometime in mid-2025, clips started circulating on social media showing things that AI video generators had never quite managed: a glass tipping off a counter and shattering with believable weight, a woman walking through rain with her coat moving correctly, a camera pushing slowly through a market stall without the whole scene dissolving into mush. The watermark said Hailuo.
Since then it has become one of the default options for anyone generating video with AI, sitting alongside Kling, Runway and Google’s Veo. It is also free to try, which is more than you can say for most of its rivals.
What Hailuo AI Actually Is
Hailuo AI is the video generation platform built by MiniMax, a Chinese AI company that has been quietly shipping competitive models for a couple of years. The company’s wider work spans language models and consumer apps, and I broke down its broader output in this piece on MiniMax’s video and language models if you want the company-level picture.
The product itself is straightforward. You type a prompt or upload a still image, and Hailuo returns a short clip, typically six or ten seconds, at up to 1080p. The current flagship model is Hailuo 02, which arrived in June 2025 and is the version responsible for most of the impressive demos you’ve seen. Older generations still exist in the interface and are cheaper on credits, but there is rarely a good reason to use them.
Access comes through the web app at hailuoai.video, through an API for developers, and through third-party platforms that have licensed the model. That last route matters more than it sounds: if you already pay for a creative tool that has integrated Hailuo, you may have access without ever opening MiniMax’s own site.
Where Hailuo AI Genuinely Performs
It handles physics better than most
This is the headline strength, and it is not marketing fluff. Ask for a pitcher of water being poured and the liquid arcs, splashes and settles in a way that reads as real. Ask for fabric in wind, and the cloth folds instead of morphing into a smooth blob. Competing models still produce that uncanny sliding effect where objects seem to glide through each other. Hailuo mostly doesn’t.
Try a prompt like “a wooden chair falls sideways onto a concrete floor, dust puffs up, morning light through a window.” The chair has weight. It lands. The dust behaves like dust.
Camera language is respected
Vague prompts produce vague results, but Hailuo responds unusually well to actual film terminology. “Slow dolly in,” “low angle,” “handheld drift,” “shallow depth of field,” “rack focus” — these phrases change the output in predictable directions. If you have ever shot video, you can direct this model in the vocabulary you already know.
Character consistency is workable
Hailuo supports subject reference, which lets you supply a face and carry it through multiple generations. It is not perfect. Faces drift over long sequences and lighting changes can nudge features around. For a two or three shot sequence, though, it holds up well enough to build a short narrative.
The Modes Worth Knowing
- Text to video — the default. Prompt in, clip out. Fastest way to test an idea.
- Image to video — upload a still, describe the motion. This is the highest-quality route in practice, because you control the composition before the model touches it.
- Subject reference — lock a character or object across generations.
- Director mode — multiple camera angles and shot changes inside a single clip, which is genuinely useful and something most competitors still don’t offer.
Resolution and duration are adjustable. Six seconds at 1080p is the sweet spot for most work; ten-second clips cost more and tend to lose coherence in the final third.
Where It Falls Apart
Worth being honest about the failures, because they will bite you eventually.
- Text inside the frame is a lost cause. Signage, labels, book spines, phone screens — it all comes out as invented gibberish.
- Hands remain hit and miss. Fingers merge, extra digits appear, and gripping motions often look wrong at close range.
- Audio doesn’t exist natively. Veo 3 generates sound alongside video. Hailuo does not, so you are adding music and effects in an editor afterwards.
- Complex interactions between three or more moving subjects degrade quickly. Crowd scenes smear.
- Queue times stretch during peak hours in North America and Europe, occasionally past ten minutes for a single 1080p generation.
Cost, Credits and Free Access
Hailuo runs on a credit system. Generations at lower resolution and shorter duration cost fewer credits, and the platform hands out a daily allowance that resets every 24 hours. For casual experimentation, that daily allowance is often enough on its own. Paid plans add monthly credits and reduce queue priority.
If you want to stretch the free tier as far as it goes, there is a decent walkthrough on Hailuo AI free credits and how to get started without spending anything. The short version: log in daily, test at lower resolution, and save your 1080p credits for the handful of shots that will actually make the final cut.
How It Stacks Up Against the Rest
Kling is the closest competitor and arguably better at human motion in tight shots. Runway offers a deeper editing suite around its models and is the stronger choice if you want one tool for the whole pipeline. Veo 3 wins on anything requiring sound. Hailuo’s edge is the combination of physical realism, camera control and price — it does the difficult physics work well and lets you try a lot of ideas before you pay anything.
For a lot of people, that combination is the deciding factor. Not because it is the best at any single thing, but because it is very good at the thing that matters most and cheap enough to use daily.
Prompting Hailuo AI Well
Prompt structure matters more than prompt length. A formula that works consistently: shot type, subject and action, environment and lighting, camera movement. Here is a real example that produces reliable results.
“Medium shot, a baker slides a tray of croissants onto a steel counter, steam rises from the tray, warm window light from the left, slight handheld camera drift, shallow depth of field.”
A few principles worth internalising:
- One action per clip. Two actions in six seconds produces neither.
- Describe movement rather than outcomes. “A man reaches for the door handle,” not “a man opens the door and walks outside.”
- Name the light. “Overcast,” “golden hour,” “neon from the right” all visibly change the render.
- Skip celebrity names. They trigger moderation and produce generic faces anyway.
The Part Most People Get Wrong
Six seconds is short, and the temptation is to treat each generation as the final product. That is the wrong mental model. Treat it as a shot, not a scene.
The workflow that gets results: write ten prompt variations for a single idea and generate all of them, because hit rate hovers around one in four for anything ambitious. Take the best one, export its final frame, and use that frame as the starting image for the next generation. The result is a continuous sequence you can cut together rather than a series of disconnected clips. Batch your generations in the evening when queues are lighter, and keep a running document of prompts that worked.
Do that and Hailuo AI stops being a novelty and starts being a tool. Thirty seconds of usable footage takes an afternoon rather than a week of shooting — which, for storyboarders, solo creators and anyone who needs a shot that would otherwise require a crew, is the whole point.