Tencent is pushing its next-generation artificial intelligence model Hy3 (Hunyuan 3.0) into global markets, stepping up efforts to target overseas developers and companies. Its strategy is to boost competitiveness in the productivity AI market by applying the technology not only as a large language model but also to workplace AI agents and design platforms.

On Aug. 5 local time, the South China Morning Post reported that Tencent made Hy3 available to global developers, companies and general users through its workplace AI agent platform WorkBuddy, design creation tool Tencent Design Meora, and model platform TokenHub.

The move follows Tencent's official launch of Hy3 last month and aims to expand overseas access. Tencent is offering Hy3 free to users worldwide on WorkBuddy through Aug. 31. It aims to secure early overseas users among developers and companies and expand its influence in the global AI ecosystem.

Tencent highlighted AI agent capabilities as Hy3's biggest differentiator. Poshu Yeung (포슈 영), senior vice president at Tencent Cloud and head of international business, said Hy3 supports companies in using AI in a practical, reliable and scalable way beyond the experimentation stage. The focus is on strengthening productivity tools that can be used in real workplace environments rather than competing only on model performance.

Hy3 has about 295 billion parameters. Tencent said the model is not larger than rivals, but it delivers the best performance among the AI it has developed so far.

The industry is also paying attention to the launch as the first result of Tencent's AI organisational overhaul. It is the first major AI update since Yao Shunyu (야오순위), a former OpenAI researcher, joined Tencent late last year to oversee foundation model development.

Usage indicators are also rising quickly. Tencent said Hy3's API calls have increased more than 68 times from the previous generation, and that it ranked No. 1 in OpenRouter's global LLM usage ranking in its first week after launch. As of Aug. 5, it ranked third on OpenRouter behind DeepSeek V4 Flash and Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5.

Tencent's latest move also ties into competition among Chinese AI companies. Alibaba, ByteDance, DeepSeek and Zhipu AI are vying in China's generative AI market, and Tencent is focusing on expanding an AI agent ecosystem centred on Hy3.

According to market research firm Analysys, Tencent's workplace AI platform WorkBuddy had about 21,000,000 users as of June, the highest among desktop-based AI agents. That put it ahead of ByteDance's Trae IDE and Alibaba's CoderWork.

Tencent first unveiled its AI model in 2023 under the name Hunyuan and later developed the Hy series. Over the past year, it was assessed as lagging rival models such as Zhipu AI's GLM and Moonshot AI's Kimi in performance, prompting Tencent to reorganise its AI organisation and overhaul its research and development system.

In a presentation in June, Yao said Tencent newly built pre-training and reinforcement learning infrastructure for Hy3 and also overhauled its dataset and model evaluation system.

The industry sees the global expansion as more than an overseas service rollout, and as the first test of Tencent's revamped AI strategy. Attention is focused on how quickly Hy3 can secure users overseas and whether Tencent can expand its position in the generative AI race in China and globally.