Tencent Hunyuan Hy4 Gains Vision and Computer Use, Undercuts Claude
3 min readTencent switched on vision and computer use for its Hunyuan Hy4 model on November 4, turning a text-only coding model into an agent that can read charts, inspect documents and click through software on its own. The Tencent Hunyuan Hy4 update arrives with aggressive pricing and a notable catch: the open weights that rivals expected are delayed.
Background: From Text-Only Preview to Agent
Tencent released the Hy4 preview on August 28 as a 770 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model aimed at coding and office work. That preview shipped under an Apache 2.0 license with downloadable weights on Hugging Face, but it could not process a single image. Ten weeks later, the model can reason across multiple images, operate command-line tools and drive graphical interfaces.
The company previewed the visual capabilities at its Global Digital Ecosystem Summit on October 29, where it also announced that a faster Hy4 Flash variant is on the way.
What Tencent Launched
According to Startup Fortune, Hy4 is available through Tencent Cloud’s TokenHub, OpenRouter and Tencent’s WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy products. Usage is free inside those products through November 15. After that, pricing is set at $0.834 per million input tokens and $2.501 per million output tokens, a fraction of what Anthropic charges for Claude Opus 5.5. TokenHub adds a 50 percent discount through the end of December.
Tencent’s own figures put Hy4 at 78.9 on the OSWorld 2.1 computer-use benchmark, behind Claude Opus 5.5 at 81.8 and Moonshot’s Kimi K3.1 Pro at 79.6, but ahead of GPT-6.1 Sol at 75.2. On an internal finance evaluation of 579 real-world tasks, Hy4 scored 3.04 against 2.97 for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash. The company also says its hallucination rate in search evaluations fell from 15.76 percent in the August preview to 5.45 percent now. None of these results have been independently reproduced.
Training focused on office tasks, financial analysis and game development, including operating Blender and CAD tools. For now Hy4 is API only, with the weights and a system card promised later.
Why It Matters
Computer-use agents are the current battleground among frontier labs, and Tencent is now within three points of the leader at a price that undercuts Western rivals by a wide margin. For developers in China and across Asia, that combination makes Hy4 a serious default option for automating desktop workflows.
The delayed weights are the story to watch. Chinese labs built their global reputation on open releases, and Tencent holding Hy4 back, even temporarily, hints at a shift toward protecting its most capable models. Whether the weights land before the free trial ends on November 15 will say a lot about where Chinese open-weight strategy is heading.
Tencent has closed the capability gap faster than many expected. The next question is how long it stays open.