The mysterious Hy3 LLM is topping OpenRouter Model Rankings by a large margin | Max Woolf's BlogThe mysterious Hy3 LLM is topping OpenRouter Model Rankings by a large margin<br>May 26, 2026 · 9 min<br>OpenRouter 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&rsquo;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.<br>Retrieved May 25, 2026.<br>Two new models are now beating LLM darling Claude in terms of token usage and by more than 50%? I&rsquo;ve heard of DeepSeek Flash V4: it&rsquo;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&rsquo;s no surprise that it&rsquo;s incredibly popular. But what the heck is Hy3 preview? I&rsquo;ve never heard of Hy3 or anyone talking about it. Googling it returns an announcement from Chinese megacorp Tencent about Hy3&rsquo;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.<br>Coding-oriented benchmark results for Hy3 from Tencent&rsquo;s Hugging Face repo.<br>A Hacker News search for Hy3 only returned a single submission that isn&rsquo;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&rsquo;s usage in the weekly rankings above is from paying users.<br>Hy3 preview is apparently popular in domains outside of agentic coding as well.<br>Retrieved May 25, 2026.<br>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&rsquo;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.<br>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&rsquo;t appear to be the case.<br>Here&rsquo;s the chart of Hy3 preview model usage over time on OpenRouter from the model page:<br>Hy3 preview has no usage data before May 8, which implies that is the time the model switched from the free SKU to the paid SKU. Usage is also steady over time since then with the initial rankings shown in this post being several weeks after launch, showing that the usage is at least organic (or very expensive to fake) and not a one-off outlier. Of note, if you do the math on the numbers presented here, the input-token-to-output-token breakdown on LLM API calls is now 98% input , 2% output in aggregate.<br>For the OpenRouter AI Model Rankings, there have historically been spikes by specific apps switching their default to a particular LLM, such as when Kilo Code offered Grok Code Fast 1 for free in September 2025, which rocketed it up in popularity. That does not appear to be the case here because apps only constitute a very small part of Hy3 preview&rsquo;s activity.<br>The top 5 apps accout for OpenRouter&rsquo;s value proposition is the ability to automatically route a given API request to different providers: for open-weight models such as DeepSeek V4 Flash, OpenRouter lists 13 providers, but Hy3 preview only has one provider despite its open weights1: the Singapore-based SiliconFlow. Their usage page on OpenRouter shows that SiliconFlow had relatively little usage&mldr;until Hy3.<br>The green area corresponds to free Hy3 usage while the blue area corresponds to paid Hy3 usage: OpenRouter does not differentiate them on mouseover which I suspect is a bug.<br>Coincidentially that data visualization shows that usage didn&rsquo;t drop drastically when Hy3 preview moved from free to paid, which in itself is interesting: if users were not getting value from the free model, they likely would have stopped using it once the costs hit their wallet.<br>What am I missing? Am I overthinking it and the answer is really because &ldquo;it&rsquo;s the cheapest&rdquo; and it received sufficient loss leader traction from the free period?<br>&mldr;but is Hy3 preview actually the cheapest LLM...