AI Video Weekly Roundup — October 26, 2026

Kling’s X account says the 4.0 API is rolling out. Kling’s own pricing page says access is not yet available. fal, meanwhile, is already selling API calls at its own price. That gap is the week’s story. Underneath it, two other things want error bars: FLUX 3 Max’s “tied for #1” and a HeyGen post-train sitting on top of a no-audio board.

Models covered: Kling 4.0 · FLUX 3 Max · HeyGen Video 1 · MiniMax H3 · Runway Creative

🔌 Kling says its 4.0 API is rolling out. Its price page says not yet.

On Oct 21 Kling posted: “KLING 4.0 API — Officially Rolling Out Now.” That is the fourth version of the post. The first, 22 minutes earlier, said the API was “Now Open”; X’s edit history records the change. The consumer model had been available since Oct 15, with the API on the coming-soon list. So far, so orderly.

Then read the developer page. kling.ai/dev/pricing, read Oct 25, carries a Kling 4.0 row under a “Coming Soon” tab: 1.0 unit a second at 720p and 1.5 at 1080p without video input, 0.6 and 0.9 with it, 4K blank. The note above it says the prices “are for preview purposes only and cannot be used to submit requests before launch.” A “Kling 4.0 Flash” row reads TBA. The prepaid packages are not compatible with either model, and access runs through a business inquiry form. A guide page on the same site carries a “Kling 4.0 API Coming Soon” banner.

Kling publishes no cash rate for 4.0. Its list unit is $0.14 on the 3.0 rows, but nothing on the page says that applies here, so we are not multiplying it out.

The hosts split. fal said on Oct 21, 73 minutes before Kling’s post first went up, that Kling 4.0 was available “exclusively through the fal UX and fal Agent. API access coming soon.” Two days later it said the model was publicly available on fal with API access open to all customers, and its model pages price it at $0.157 a second at 720p and $0.235 at 1080p. Runway put Unlimited Kling 4 on its plans and cut 25% off the model on all plans, and Runway’s developer account said on Oct 23 that Kling 4.0 is on Runway Dev by API at 20% off through Nov 30. Runway’s developer changelog, models guide and pricing guide list no Kling 4.0; the changelog’s latest entry is Oct 21, an image model, and its Kling entry is Oct 13, covering 2.5 Turbo Pro, 3.0 and O3. Adobe says Kling 4.0 is now in Firefly; its partner-models page, read Oct 25, still listed 3.0. No Kling 4.0 appears on any Artificial Analysis video board.

We could not call any of these APIs, so whether a developer can use 4.0 is what each seller says: fal and Runway’s developer account say yes, Kling’s own pricing page says not yet, and Runway’s docs are silent. The one page that would price a direct call labels its numbers a preview.

Why it matters: Kling edited its own post from “now open” to “rolling out” inside 22 minutes, and its price table takes it back further still. The resellers will sell you the API today at their own rates; Kling has published none, so price a plan against the reseller’s page and wait for Kling’s date.

fal Research and Black Forest Labs launched FLUX 3 Max on Oct 19. fal called it tied for #1 in image-to-video; BFL went with “Tied for #1 in image-to-video,” plus 22× faster than Seedance 2.5 at the same quality. Neither post names the audio toggle.

On Artificial Analysis’s image-to-video board with audio, read Oct 25, FLUX 3 Max (720p) is second at 1138 ±15. MiniMax H3 is first at 1140 ±16, Seedance 2.5 sits at 1138 ±17, Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 at 1132 and Wan 3.0 at 1127. The spread runs 1140 to 1125 with intervals of ±15 to ±17 on every row, which makes it a tie among six with no leader. On the text-to-video board with audio it is sixth, at 1155 ±15, behind Wan 3.0 at 1175. It has no row on either no-audio board or on video editing. fal’s own model page is careful here: the “joint #1” describes the image-to-video evaluation only.

The price is a promotion. fal’s page lists $0.0425 a second at 720p and $0.0725 at 1080p, 75% off from Oct 15 to Nov 7, after which they become $0.17 and $0.29. BFL’s reply said two weeks and fal’s post said three; the page is the one with a date. BFL’s own pricing has no Max row, only FLUX 3 Video: $0.15, $0.24, $0.28 and $0.41 a second across HD to UHD for text and image input, $0.06 for a draft, and $0.21 to $0.45 for video-to-video. After Nov 7, fal’s $0.17 at 720p sits above BFL’s $0.15 HD rate for the base model. They are different models, so that is not a verdict on value, but the price advantage lasts exactly as long as the promotion does.

The speed claims are vendor-only and don’t agree on the decimals: BFL says 10 seconds of video in 12, fal’s page says about 11, and fal’s post three days after launch says 12.45 against 277.8 for Seedance 2.5. ComfyUI added FLUX 3 Max on Oct 21. No licence or weights terms appear anywhere we looked, and there is no Hugging Face repository for it.

Why it matters: “Tied for #1” is a statement about error bars on one toggle of one board. The same model is sixth on the sibling board, and its price is a promotion.

📊 An H3 post-train is first on a no-audio board, inside the error bars

HeyGen Video 1 is first on Artificial Analysis’s no-audio text-to-video board at 1144 ±17, ten points ahead of Wan 3.0 (1134 ±18) and 24 ahead of H3 itself (1120). That is a tie at the top, earned at a non-default setting: when the row first appeared, AA labelled it “HeyGen Video (ultraquality)”, the highest and slowest of HeyGen’s four prompt-enhancement options. With audio it is third, at 1160 ±15. AA dates the row Oct 13; the model launched Sept 30, so this is the benchmark catching up rather than a new release. It has no row on the image-to-video or editing boards.

HeyGen’s developer docs say the model is “built on MiniMax H3 and post-trained by HeyGen.” Its platform page lists rates from $0.01 a second at 480p to $0.105 for text or image clips over 15 seconds at 1080p or 2K, with a launch promotion on clips up to 15 seconds; HeyGen’s developer page and fal’s listing quote different rates for the same model, so the platform table is the one to read. By row, 768p text-to-video is $0.018, 1080p $0.04 and 2K $0.05; reference-to-video runs $0.035 to $0.09.

Now the licence. The MiniMax H3 licence defines its excluded territories as “the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States of America.” It requires written authorisation above US$20 million in yearly revenue, bars using the works or outputs to improve another model, and invites people in the excluded territories to ask for a licence, which it says will be granted on the strength of their controls and guardrails. HeyGen is a US company. The top no-audio entry is therefore a derivative of a model whose licence puts the US outside its territory. We found no public statement on how those terms apply to HeyGen’s API, and nothing here says they were broken. The mismatch is the news, and it is not unique: NVIDIA’s StreamRender-H3 is a US lab’s build under the same terms.

The shelf also gained weights. FastVideo’s FastH3 Omni, a distilled H3 for reference-guided video and audio, was published Oct 20, and ComfyUI announced “open weights and cloud” the same day. The ComfyUI-format repository carries the MiniMax H3 community licence tag. FastVideo says it cuts 50 evaluations to 8 and latency 5.6 to 11.9× across 27 matched workloads on eight GB200 GPUs; those are its numbers. The preview Reactor offered exclusively on its API ran to Oct 20, the date the weights appeared. The base H3 model card says the 2K module is not open-sourced, a release-scope fact rather than a licence term.

Why it matters: A ten-point lead with ±17 error bars is a tie, and the licence travels with every derivative. Read both before you build on a board position.

🛒 Runway joins Claude Marketplace

On Oct 20 Runway said eligible enterprise customers can put part of their Anthropic commitment toward Runway Creative. Its announcement lists Gen-4.5, Aleph 2.0, Seedance 2.5, Kling 4.0 and ElevenLabs V4 inside Creative, with no price or terms. Runway’s developer account says Kling 4.0 is on Runway Dev by API; the developer docs list no Kling 4.0, so Kling 4.0 is on one Runway surface and, in the docs, not on the other.

Why it matters: This is a procurement route more than a product. Budget already committed to Anthropic can now pay for video generation, which is the sort of detail finance teams care about.

🧾 Also this week

Poseidon Wave Media v. Black Forest Labs: a copyright complaint was filed Oct 20 in the Eastern District of New York (1:26-cv-06737) and amended on Oct 22. The docket spells the defendant “Black Forst Labs.” We have not read the amended complaint, so we can’t report what it alleges.

📈 By the Numbers

1.0 / 1.5 — Kling 4.0 units a second at 720p and 1080p, preview rows on Kling’s pricing page; the page says access is not yet available.
1138 ±15 — FLUX 3 Max (720p), second on AA’s image-to-video board with audio, one of a six-way tie; sixth on text-to-video at 1155.
$0.17 — FLUX 3 Max at 720p once fal’s promotion ends Nov 7, against $0.0425 now.
1144 vs 1134 — HeyGen Video 1 over Wan 3.0 on no-audio text-to-video, at ±17 and ±18.
4 — territories the MiniMax H3 licence excludes: the EU, UK, South Korea and the US.
0 — Kling 4.0 rows across Artificial Analysis’s three video boards, read Oct 25.

🔮 What to Watch Next Week

Kling 4.0: a published cash rate, a launch date for Kling’s own API, whether Runway’s developer docs catch up with its account, Kling 4.0 Flash and the 10-bit HDR output still listed as coming, and any Artificial Analysis entry.
FLUX 3 Max: a BFL price row for Max and the Nov 7 promotion end.
Artificial Analysis: whether the HeyGen Video 1 and Wan 3.0 tie on no-audio text-to-video separates, and the image-to-video v2.1 rebuild the page lists as coming soon.
Poseidon v. Black Forest Labs: the complaint, once it can be read, and any response.

For full specs, pricing, and access details on every model covered this week, see the AI Video Stack 2026 reference page — updated every Monday.