Tencent’s Hy4 has moved from preview to official release, adding visual understanding for the first time and stronger performance on long, agent-style tasks. The model appeared on OpenRouter on November 4 with a 1.05-million-token context window — why it matters: one of China’s biggest open model lines just graduated from preview to a production release.
November 4, 2026 — AI News
What happened
OpenRouter’s Tencent listing now carries Hy4 as the official release, described as delivering “comprehensive and substantial improvements over Hy4 Preview, with particularly strong gains in agentic capabilities and performance across a wide range of long-horizon, real-world productivity tasks.” The release also introduces visual understanding for the first time, making Hy4 multimodal where the preview was text-focused.
The details that matter
Hy4 accepts up to 1,048,576 tokens per request on OpenRouter, the largest context window of any Tencent model listed there. Launch pricing is shown at $0.417 per million input tokens and $1.251 per million output tokens, with the listing carrying a 50% off tag against the $0.834 / $2.501 rates the preview launched at in August. For background, Hy4 Preview was a 770-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 49 billion parameters active per token, released with open weights under Apache 2.0 — Tencent has not, in the listing, restated the official release’s parameter counts, so treat the preview’s architecture figures as background, not confirmed specs for this version.
Why it matters
Preview-to-official is the moment a model stops being an experiment and starts being something teams can build on. Hy4’s pitch is clear: very long context, agent and productivity workloads, vision added, and API pricing well under the US frontier labs. What is missing so far is independent benchmarking of the official release — the improvement claims are Tencent’s own wording on the listing. Until third-party results land, Hy4 is a promising, aggressively priced option to test, not a proven frontier rival.
Frequently asked questions
What is new in Tencent Hy4’s official release?
Compared with Hy4 Preview, Tencent claims substantial gains in agentic capability and long-horizon productivity tasks, and the official release adds visual understanding for the first time.
How much does Hy4 cost on OpenRouter?
The listing shows $0.417 per million input tokens and $1.251 per million output tokens, tagged as 50% off the preview’s $0.834 / $2.501 rates.
How large is Hy4’s context window?
Up to 1,048,576 tokens per request on OpenRouter — the largest of any Tencent model listed there.
Sources: OpenRouter, Tencent