Tencent Hy4 Launches: New Flagship AI Model in 2026

By PowerfulAI.tools Editorial Team

Tencent, the Chinese company behind WeChat, has launched Hy4, the full version of its newest flagship large language model. It follows a preview version released in August. Tencent says Hy4 can now understand images for the first time and can operate a computer on your behalf.

Tencent announced Hy4 on 4 November 2026. Here is what launched, where you can use it, what it costs and what it means if you are not a developer.

Image: Tencent

What launched

Hy4 is the latest model in Tencent's Hy family. Tencent describes it as its latest-generation large language model and says it now ranks among the world's leading open-source AI models.

When Tencent released the Hy4 preview on 28 August 2026, it said the model had 770 billion parameters in total, with 49 billion active at a time, and a context window of more than one million tokens. The new announcement does not repeat those figures, so we cannot confirm whether they changed for the full release.

According to Tencent, the main changes in the full version are:

• Visual understanding: Hy4 can now read images, including detailed image processing, chart analysis and maths problems shown as pictures.
• Computer use: for the first time, it can operate both command-line tools and normal on-screen interfaces.
• Professional software: Tencent says it was specially trained on programs such as Blender and CAD tools.
• Better everyday reliability: Tencent reports improvements in following instructions, handling long documents and working through long, multi-step tasks.

Tencent also says the hallucination rate (how often the model makes things up) fell from 12.95% in the preview to 7.2%. These are Tencent's own results. We have not tested them.

Who can use it and where

Tencent says Hy4 is available now across its own products, including Tencent Cloud TokenHub, the WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy assistants, the Yuanbao chatbot app, the AI assistant in WeCom (its business messaging app) and its ima app. It says integrations are underway for QQ, the games Honor of Kings and Game of Peace, WeRead and Tencent News.

Developers outside Tencent's own platforms can also reach Hy4 through third-party services, including OpenRouter, Hermes and OpenCode.

Tencent's announcement does not list which countries each app is available in. Many of the Tencent apps named are aimed mainly at users in China, so for most Australians the practical way to try Hy4 is likely to be through a developer platform such as OpenRouter.

Open weights

The Hy4 preview was released as an open-source model. For the full Hy4, Tencent says it plans to release the model weights and system cards "in the coming days", with a focus on cybersecurity and biological safety. At the time of writing, the full Hy4 weights had not yet been released.

What it costs

Tencent lists standard developer pricing of about US$0.90 per million input tokens and US$2.70 per million output tokens, with cached input at about US$0.045 per million tokens. Tencent says this is the same as the preview's pricing.

Tencent is also running launch promotions, which are not the normal price:

• WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy are free from 4 to 15 November 2026.
• Hy4 on Tencent Cloud TokenHub is 50% off standard pricing until 31 December 2026.

Tencent also says a cheaper, faster version called Hy4 Flash is coming soon, but it has not given a date or price.

What it means for ordinary users

For most people in Australia, Hy4 will not replace the AI chatbot they already use any time soon. Its main consumer home is Tencent's own apps, and many of those are built for the Chinese market.

The bigger story is competition. Tencent is now pitching Hy4 directly against other Chinese models such as DeepSeek and Kimi, and in one of its own tests with finance professionals it scored Hy4 ahead of DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and Kimi K3.1 Pro. If the full weights are released as promised, developers and businesses will be able to run a large, capable model on their own hardware, which tends to push prices down across the industry.

If you build apps or automations, Hy4's listed prices are low compared with many flagship models, and the computer-use and image features make it worth a look once you can test it on your own tasks. Everyone else can simply watch for apps that start using it behind the scenes.

How we checked

We checked this post against Tencent's own pages on 5 November 2026: the official announcement Tencent Launches Hy4, Joining the Ranks of the World's Leading Open-Source AI Models (published 4 November 2026) and the earlier Tencent Releases and Open-Sources Tencent Hy4 preview announcement (28 August 2026). Prices are Tencent's listed US dollar developer prices. Benchmark and hallucination figures are Tencent's own. We have not tested Hy4 ourselves.