Tencent Hy4: The Real Move Isn’t the Model—It’s the Price War

In May 2025, Tencent released Hy4, its flagship large language model, with a pricing structure that reads less like a technical spec and more like a declaration of war. Input: ¥6 per million tokens. Output: ¥18 per million tokens. Cache hits: ¥0.3 per million tokens—85% cheaper than the nearest competitor's ¥2. The internal blind test scores tell a more ambiguous story: Hy4 scored 2.99/4 across 203 real engineering tasks, narrowly edging out GLM-5.3 (2.92) and Kimi K3 (2.94). Meanwhile, public benchmarks tell a different story: Hy4 trails GLM-5.3 on DeepSWE and CyberGym, two specialized tests for code generation and cybersecurity. Tencent is not claiming universal superiority. It's claiming domain-specific competence, then pricing like a disruptor.