The model Europe was not allowed to have: Tencent drops the regional carve-outs from Hy3 and goes global

Chinese open-weight models have spent the past two years competing on size and price. Tencent's Hy3 has quietly been competing on something else: who is allowed to download it. When the preview build appeared in April 2026, its licence carried a geographic exclusion — the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea were carved out. The official release on 6 July 2026 removed the clause entirely and put the weights under a plain Apache 2.0 licence, one of the most permissive terms yet attached to a model of this scale. On 5 August Tencent completed the move by announcing global availability: the WorkBuddy assistant, the Miora design tool and Tencent Cloud TokenHub, plus third-party access through OpenRouter and downloads on Hugging Face and ModelScope. The model itself is a sparse mixture-of-experts design: 295 billion parameters in total, roughly 21 billion activated per token across 192 experts with top-8 routing, 80 layers, and a separate 3.8-billion-parameter multi-token-prediction stack that speeds up decoding. The context window is 256,000 tokens. The distinctive feature is that the amount of deliberation is a setting rather than a separate product — no_think answers immediately, think_low reasons briefly, think_high runs an extended chain — so one endpoint covers both a chat reply and a long analytical job. Tencent's own framing is that Hy3 performs comparably to flagship models with two to five times as many parameters, across reasoning, instruction following, in-context learning, code generation and agentic work. The company also reports that within a week of launch, API traffic to Hy3 ran 68 times higher than to the previous generation, putting it first on OpenRouter's usage leaderboard. Listed OpenRouter pricing is 0.1288 US dollars per million input tokens and 0.5336 per million output; access through WorkBuddy is free until 31 August 2026. The usage number is the one to watch. Benchmark parity claims from vendors are routine; a 68-fold jump in paid API calls is a statement about how many developers actually switched. Independent coverage broadly agrees with the performance claims, with coding the one area where rival open-weight models still hold an edge.