GoKawiilOpenRouter is a service that provides access to most LLMs with a singular API, which has become exceedingly useful as of late given the rapid cadence of new LLM releases. Due to the company’s role as an intermediary between users and the LLM APIs, OpenRouter has robust, representative data on how users interact with LLMs and it publishes this data on the AI Model Rankings page: a welcome deviation from the labs themselves which generally keep this data secret for competitive reasons. Recently, I checked the OpenRouter rankings and noticed something peculiar.
Retrieved May 25, 2026.
Two new models are now beating LLM darling Claude in terms of token usage and by more than 50%? I’ve heard of DeepSeek Flash V4: it’s an open-source release from DeepSeek that is not only fast/cheap, but also performs closer to the leading LLM models at a very low cost so it’s no surprise that it’s incredibly popular. But what the heck is Hy3 preview? I’ve never heard of Hy3 or anyone talking about it. Googling it returns an announcement from Chinese megacorp Tencent about Hy3’s open-source release: the model page itself on Hugging Face is sparse and includes oddly honest benchmark results that are not favorable for the model compared to other Chinese open-source models.
Coding-oriented benchmark results for Hy3 from Tencent’s Hugging Face repo.
A Hacker News search for Hy3 only returned a single submission that isn’t about Hy3, and Reddit discussion is more about the open-weights release. One Reddit thread also noted the rise of Hy3 but from May 6, when Hy3 was offered by OpenRouter for free; that free endpoint is no longer available, and therefore Hy3’s usage in the weekly rankings above is from paying users.
Hy3 preview is apparently popular in domains outside of agentic coding as well.
Retrieved May 25, 2026.
Did I miss something? After some nonscientific testing, the model quality is indeed on par with the other Chinese models indicated and not close to models such as Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5. It’s not a magic overlooked diamond-in-the-rough, so there has to be something else at play. Fortunately, OpenRouter has the data to narrow down possible explanations, but after checking the data I became more confused.
Hy3 preview is available from the OpenRouter API at a stated price of $0.066/1M tokens input which is indeed cheaper than the current top-ranked model DeepSeek V4 Flash with a stated price of $0.10/1M tokens input. Given the drastically rising cost of LLMs and coding agents, it makes sense that a cheaper model would prevail, but only if it offered similar quality and that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Here’s the chart of Hy3 preview model usage over time on OpenRouter from the model page:
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