Head to head · LLM inference · October 2026 research run

Tencent Hy4 vs Vercel AI Gateway

Vercel AI Gateway scores 69 (B) on agent readiness against Tencent Hy4's 64 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Tencent Hy4 leads on payments & pricing. Both do llm inference.

Best model APIs and inference for AI agents · All 1044 models comparisons

Which one, for what

Tencent Hy4 B

Best for Long-context agent work, coding and office or finance tasks on a 1M-token context with images, for teams already on Tencent Cloud or happy to verify an account there.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 45 against 30

Also in its favour

  • No incidents deducted, where Vercel AI Gateway loses 3 points for them

Watch for

Weights, licence and system card are promised but not published; tencent/Hy4 didn't answer on Hugging Face on 11 November

Vercel AI Gateway B

Best for Teams that want one key, one bill, budgets and failover in front of many model providers, especially on Vercel with OIDC.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 79 against 46
  • Security & auth, 79 against 71
  • Maintenance & community, 79 against 73
  • Transparency & trust, 71 against 52

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install

Watch for

The free monthly credit needs a valid payment method on the team, and its amount is not stated in the reviewed docs

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Reliability Vercel AI Gateway +33

Tencent Hy4 46

Model reading for hy4 on Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Platform facts are the tencent-tokenhub listing's (checked 1 November), carried over as RULES.md allows for a model on an already graded platform. No public status page (0) and so no incident record to read (5 of 30). Per-model rate limits only in the console and DescribeModelQuota (8 of 15). Six 429 codes, Retry-After and backoff advice (13 of 15). The TokenHub SLA promises 99.5% a month, and Hy4 is Tencent's own model, so the third-party exclusion doesn't apply (10). Released as hy4 on 4 November, a separate id from hy4-preview, with no preview label (10). 0 + 5 + 8 + 13 + 10 + 10 = 46.

Vercel AI Gateway 79

Hosted reading. AI Gateway is a component on www.vercel-status.com (20). The history feed, re-read on 1 November 2026, has 25 entries from 23 July to 23 October, so it covers the whole 90 days from 3 August. None names AI Gateway in its title or text. The Drains, Logs and Observability incidents (6, 17 and 20 August, 16 to 17 September, 10 October in Washington, which names delayed logs, metrics and traces in general, and 23 October) name no AI Gateway surface, and none reports requests failing. Component tags sit in the status API, which robots.txt disallows, so they were not used. A readable page that posts incidents, none touching the product, is a clean record, as vercel-connect's incidents were read from the same feed (30). The rate-limit page, re-read on 1 November, says it describes behaviour rather than fixed numbers. The paid tier has no gateway limit, and the free tier's per-model limits are not published (5 of 15). A 429 has a documented JSON body, some carry retry-after, the docs give backoff code and separate a 429 from a 402 budget rejection, and failed provider attempts are retried on other providers (14 of 15). The Enterprise SLA excludes the APIs and CLI, and no SLA naming AI Gateway was found (0). Generally available since 21 August 2025. Token Pass is early access and the Python SDK is in beta (10).

Transparency & trust Vercel AI Gateway +19

Tencent Hy4 52

Model reading for hy4 on Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Platform facts are the tencent-tokenhub listing's (checked 1 November), carried over as RULES.md allows for a model on an already graded platform. Closed service under the TokenHub terms, but Tencent's release headline calls Hy4 open source while the weights and system card are only promised 'in the coming days', with no licence stated, and tencent/Hy4 didn't answer on Hugging Face on 11 November (14 of 30). Terms and FAQ agree inputs aren't used for training; the privacy policy renders only with JavaScript and wasn't read (15 of 30). Dated retirement notices and shutdown fields (13 of 20). Processing generally in mainland China for the China site, Singapore for the international one (13 of 20). Every benchmark in the release is Tencent's own or a partner's. 14 + 15 + 13 + 13 = 55.

Vercel AI Gateway 71

Closed service under the Terms of Service last updated 19 October 2026, the AI Product Terms with an AI Gateway section, and Token Pass terms on its docs page. Routed models carry the terms of 64 providers listed in the Notices and Licence Information, and the SDK is Apache-2.0 (18 of 30). The FAQ, the ZDR page and the logs page agree that prompt and response content is not kept. The terms place content sent to providers under the providers' own terms, give the no-training warranty only to Enterprise and bar sensitive personal information in Input. The DPA covers Pro and Enterprise, not Hobby, and the privacy notice gives retention criteria, not periods (17 of 30). No deprecation policy found. Model retirements carry dates in the model list, and the AI Product Terms let Vercel change fees, change or end anything in beta without notice, and end Token Pass with a pro-rata refund (8 of 20). Provider terms are listed per provider and regional inference names four regions, while the gateway itself may process a request in any Vercel region. The subprocessor list on security.vercel.com was not read (12 of 20).

Payments & pricing Tencent Hy4 +15

Tencent Hy4 45

Model reading for hy4 on Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Platform facts are the tencent-tokenhub listing's (checked 1 November), carried over as RULES.md allows for a model on an already graded platform. No machine payment protocol (0). The price page, updated 9 November, lists ¥6 input, ¥0.3 cached and ¥18 output per million tokens, with Hy4 billed at 50% until 31 December 2026 (20). TokenHub's campaign of 1M free tokens per language model, read on 1 November, isn't confirmed for hy4 on the price page, so half (10 of 20, a judgement call). A person signs up with real-name verification (0). 0 + 20 + 10 + 0 = 30. Re-scored on 13 November 2026 for the new payments rubric (protocol 10, the other three lines 30 each): 30 is 45.

Vercel AI Gateway 30

No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Per-token prices for every model are public in the keyless model list and the catalogue, and add-on prices are on the pricing page (20). A monthly free credit exists, but the getting-started page and the FAQ say the team must add a valid payment method before using it (0). A person signs up in a browser. Keys can then be created through POST /v1/api-keys, which needs a Vercel access token from that account (0). Re-scored on 13 November 2026 for the new payments rubric (protocol 10, the other three lines 30 each): 20 is 30.

Security & auth Vercel AI Gateway +8

Tencent Hy4 71

Model reading for hy4 on Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Platform facts are the tencent-tokenhub listing's (checked 1 November), carried over as RULES.md allows for a model on an already graded platform. Bearer keys limited by model, service, IP range and token quota, long-lived with no rotation (26 of 30). The terms say inputs aren't used to train Tencent Cloud's own models, and Hy4 is first party, so no third party's terms apply (14 of 20). Retention only as long as the service needs, no periods (7 of 15). Per-call audit logs and optional full logs to the customer's CLS (14 of 15). No security.txt; Tencent's TSRC bounty covers Tencent Cloud; no certification checked (10 of 20). 26 + 14 + 7 + 14 + 10 = 71.

Vercel AI Gateway 79

Router, read on the model lines. AI Gateway API keys belong to a team, can be limited to one project and given an expiry and a budget, are deactivated when their creator leaves the team, and can be revoked without authentication by reporting a leaked key. Keys carry no per-model or read-only scope apart from the Token Pass key type. On Vercel, project OIDC tokens replace long-lived keys (24 of 30). Vercel says it does not train on prompts, and the AI Product Terms make that a warranty only for Enterprise subscriptions. Provider training is filtered only when disallowPromptTraining or ZDR is set, the filter does not apply to BYOK, and the terms say Stealth Model providers may train on inputs (12 of 20). The gateway does not keep prompt or response content. Provider ZDR is free per request on Pro and Enterprise and not available on Hobby, and BYOK keys are skipped under ZDR unless marked (12 of 15). Per-request logs record status, provider attempts, tokens, cost and authentication method, with routing details kept 30 days and Trace Drains and spend reports on paid plans (13 of 15). Valid security.txt with HackerOne (re-read on 1 November, expires 28 September 2027), SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001:2022 as Vercel states them, and a public bulletin for the April 2026 incident, closed on 16 October 2026 (18 of 20).

Maintenance & community Vercel AI Gateway +6

Tencent Hy4 73

Model reading for hy4 on Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Platform facts are the tencent-tokenhub listing's (checked 1 November), carried over as RULES.md allows for a model on an already graded platform. Added on 4 November 2026 per the release notes; the model list and price page were updated on 9 November (30). Retirement notices of 21 to 33 days, no minimum written (7 of 12). Heavy retirement churn on the platform (3 of 8). Dated release notes and announcements, round-the-clock support (13 of 15). CLI replies not sampled (3 of 10). Control-plane SDKs and CLI, no inference SDK of its own (12 of 15). CLI runtime stated, CI not checked (5 of 10). 30 + 7 + 3 + 13 + 3 + 12 + 5 = 73. The model is a week old, so these lines are TokenHub's habits more than Hy4's record.

Vercel AI Gateway 79

Closed service, read on the model lines. The newest changelog entry naming AI Gateway is dated 30 October 2026 (30). Twelve models in the model list carry a deprecated_at date on 1 November, from 5 November 2026 (4 days ahead) to 26 February 2027. No minimum notice period was found, and access to Claude Fable 5 was suspended on 12 June 2026 under a government directive without notice and restored on 1 July (6 of 12). No AI Gateway endpoint was shut down in the last 90 days that we found (7 of 8). 95 changelog entries name AI Gateway from 3 August to 30 October 2026, and support runs from the dashboard (13 of 15). Replies to issues on vercel/ai were not read, because GitHub's pages refuse our reader (3 of 10). @ai-sdk/gateway is at 4.0.132 in vercel/ai, versioned on 30 October 2026, and had 29,597,661 npm downloads in the week to 12 October per the 17 October check. The Python SDK is in beta (14 of 15). Three runtime dependencies and a test file beside most modules. CI was not checked (6 of 10).

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runTencent Hy4Vercel AI GatewayEdge
Reliability16%204679Vercel AI Gateway +33
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27374Vercel AI Gateway +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.28683Tencent Hy4 +3
Security & auth14%17.57179Vercel AI Gateway +8
Payments & pricing10%12.54530Tencent Hy4 +15
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87379Vercel AI Gateway +6
Transparency & trust7%8.85271Vercel AI Gateway +19
Negative events≤150-3
TotalB 64/100B 69/100

Facts side by side

FactTencent Hy4Vercel AI Gateway
KindModel APIModel router
VendorTencent (Hy team)Vercel
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingPay per usePay per use
x402nono
LicenceHosted model under the Tencent Cloud TokenHub terms. Tencent says weights and a system card will follow; no licence is stated yetProprietary service under Vercel's Terms of Service and AI Product Terms, with Token Pass terms on its docs page. Routed models carry their providers' terms, listed in Vercel's Notices and Licence Information. The @ai-sdk/gateway provider is Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-11-042026-10-30
Terms last updatedcouldn't be read2026-06-01
Privacy policy last updatedcouldn't be read2026-06-01
Customer content may train modelscouldn't be readyes, with an opt-out
Terms restrict automated accesscouldn't be readnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingcouldn't be readnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticecouldn't be readnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivercouldn't be readyes
Popularitynone29.6M npm/wk
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (4)

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

Tencent Hy4

Tencent's flagship model is on TokenHub as hy4, with a 1M-token context, image understanding, function calling and caching, at ¥6 input and ¥18 output per million tokens, half price until the end of 2026. The weights it is called open source for aren't published yet, and every benchmark is Tencent's own.

Vercel AI Gateway

Token prices pass through with no markup, prompts are not stored by the gateway, and budgets, provider failover and per-request logs are built in. The free monthly credit needs a card on file, rate limits are not published as numbers, no SLA covers the API, and the contractual promise not to train on content applies to Enterprise subscriptions only.

Before you call either

Tencent Hy4

  1. Use model id hy4 on TokenHub's OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible endpoints; hy4-preview is a separate, older model
  2. Keep input under 960K tokens and expect at most 64K output
  3. Reuse prompt prefixes: cached input is ¥0.3 against ¥6
  4. Check the price page for the end of the 50% discount on 31 December 2026 before budgeting
  5. Read rate limits from the console or DescribeModelQuota; the public docs don't give them for chat models

Vercel AI Gateway

  1. Read GET https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1/models without a key to pick a model ID and check its price, context, ZDR and no-training flags before calling
  2. Set zeroDataRetention or disallowPromptTraining to true in providerOptions.gateway on sensitive requests. Default routing ignores provider retention and training policies
  3. Treat a 429 as retryable and honour retry-after when present. A 402 with quota_for_entity_exceeded is a spent budget, so do not retry it
  4. On a Token Pass key, a 403 with no_providers_available means spent credit or a model outside the pass. Retry with a standard AI Gateway key, which bills credits
  5. Set inferenceRegion when data residency matters. The default global may run inference outside the user's jurisdiction

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Tencent Hy4 or Vercel AI Gateway?

Vercel AI Gateway scores 69 (B) on agent readiness against Tencent Hy4's 64 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Tencent Hy4 leads on payments & pricing.

Do Tencent Hy4 and Vercel AI Gateway need an API key?

Tencent Hy4 needs an API key. Vercel AI Gateway takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Tencent Hy4 and Vercel AI Gateway without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for Tencent Hy4. Vercel AI Gateway has a hosted endpoint at https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1.

Other comparisons with Tencent Hy4 or Vercel AI Gateway

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