Tencent's biggest open-weight model dropped the clause that shut Europe out

Tencent published the weights of Hy4 preview, its largest open model so far, under a plain Apache 2.0 licence. The headline number is 780 billion parameters, of which 49 billion work on any single token, but the more consequential change is in the licence file — and it is the first time a flagship Hunyuan model can be used legally in the European Union. Every earlier Hunyuan release shipped under the Tencent Hunyuan Community License Agreement. That document opens with a sentence in capital letters stating that it does not apply in the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea, and it defines "Territory" as the whole world minus those three. A European company downloading Hunyuan A13B in 2025 was not receiving a restrictive licence — it was receiving no licence at all. The same agreement carried a second condition: anyone whose products had more than 100 million monthly active users on the release date had to ask Tencent for separate permission, granted at the company's sole discretion. On top of that sat an acceptable use policy attached as an exhibit. The LICENSE file in the Hy4 preview repository contains none of that. It is four lines of Tencent copyright notice followed by the unmodified text of the Apache License 2.0 — no territory, no user cap, no acceptable use policy, no obligation to label products "Powered by Tencent Hunyuan". Anyone may run, modify, redistribute and sell derivatives, anywhere. On the technical side the model is a mixture of experts with a context window of one million tokens, released together with an FP8 quantised variant for cheaper inference. Tencent also sells it through its own cloud at 0.83 dollars per million input tokens and 2.50 dollars per million output tokens, so the open weights compete directly with the vendor's own hosting. The word "preview" in the name is worth keeping in mind: this is a snapshot Tencent is willing to be judged on, not a finished flagship. What the licence change tells us is separate from how good the model turns out to be — a Chinese vendor has decided that the reach of an open ecosystem is worth more than the legal fence it kept around its weights for the previous two years.