Tencent opens its Hy3 large language model to global users via WorkBuddy, Miora design studio, and Tencent Cloud’s TokenHub, with free access on WorkBuddy through Pacific Time August 31, 2026.

Hy3 is integrated into WorkBuddy’s international edition, offered free through the end of August, with pricing at $0.1288 per million input tokens and $0.5336 per million output tokens thereafter, aiming to undercut Western models.

The article frames Stargate as the deployment backbone for AI and positions Hy3 as the propulsion for real-world AI usage, shifting focus from capability to tangible workflow productivity.

Hy3 uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with 295 billion total parameters and 21 billion active parameters, supporting up to a 256,000-token context.

Tencent emphasizes practical deployment features—long context support of up to 256K tokens and multi-step workflow execution—to align with enterprise needs for completing tasks, not just generating answers.

Open-source dynamics are reshaping the AI power balance, with Chinese models gaining share in global open-source downloads and analyses suggesting the U.S. advantage may be narrowing, prompting policy responses around sovereign clouds and export controls.

WorkBuddy functions as an out-of-the-box, agentic workspace where natural-language instructions trigger tasks like research, presentations, spreadsheets, and communications, with Hy3 achieving over 90% task-success and 34% faster completion versus prior generations in tests.

Tencent claims Hy3 matches flagship models on reasoning, instruction understanding, in-context learning, code generation, and agent capabilities, despite its distinct architecture.

The broader enterprise AI takeaway is affordability, reliability, and scalable task completion, favoring open, interoperable ecosystems over frontier performance alone.

Hy3 began as a rebuild of Tencent’s model program in late January 2026, with a preview in April and an official July 6, 2026 release that enhanced reinforcement learning and data quality.

Hy3 rapidly led OpenRouter’s global tool-call volume within a week of the July launch, handling about 33 million autonomous tool calls daily and capturing 8.9% of global agentic traffic.

Since the preview, daily token use surged, active WorkBuddy users grew, API calls spiked after the July release, and Hy3 topped OpenRouter’s global LLM usage leaderboard within a week.