Tencent / Hunyuan

Calif, a Palo Alto security firm, built an AI-powered worm called WeWorm that can hijack millions of WeChat accounts within hours and spread phone-to-phone without user clicks. WeChat has 1.4 billion monthly users and is embedded in payments and government services. Fudan scholar Zhao Minghao called the destructive capability 'a new kind of nuclear weapon.' Calif disclosed the flaw to the White House and Tencent; China's foreign ministry spokesperson said she was 'unaware' of it. The incident may shape the Trump-Xi meeting on Sept 24, where AI safety is on the agenda. Anthropic separately reported Claude misuse for bioweapons research and military surveillance. Analysts warn mutual suspicion could fuel an AI offense-defense spiral, though some see a chance for cooperation.

Calif built a demo worm that hijacks WeChat accounts over VoIP calls on iOS and Android, no user interaction needed. An attacker calls a friend, takes over their account while the phone is still ringing, then uses that account to call the next victim. AI helped find the bug and write the RCE exploit in about two days; the full worm took one more week. Tencent mitigated the issue server-side for all users by late August. Technical details are withheld for a future conference talk.

Enflame, a Tencent-backed AI chipmaker, raised about $911 million in its Shanghai STAR Market IPO and surged 188% on day one. The company makes AI training and inference chips. The pop shows strong appetite for a domestic AI chip alternative, but the article doesn't disclose its latest revenue or profit figures, so I'd discount the valuation for now.

DeepSeek released V4.1 Flash, a 552B MoE model that activates only 8B params on input and 16B on output. It uses a new asymmetric Causal-Encoder-Decoder architecture and scores above DeepSeek V4 Pro on benchmarks. KV cache size drops to 1/4 HBM and 1/8 SSD vs the previous gen, cutting agent-scenario cache costs. The API is live under model name deepseek-flash; V4 Pro will be routed to V4.1 Flash from Sep 14 noon Beijing time and billed at Flash pricing. New peak/off-peak prices start Sep 10 noon, with off-peak at half rate. Weights and a tech report are open on HuggingFace; DeepSeek invites contact for large-scale deployments needing a 2k-GPU cluster.

Calif researchers used a mix of AI models to build WeWorm in just over a week—a zero-click worm that spreads across iOS and Android through WeChat. An incoming call from a compromised contact is enough; the worm hijacks the account and then dials the victim's own contacts. Tencent confirmed the flaw and patched it, stating no users were affected. The attack exploits WeChat's trust model for saved contacts and, combined with other bugs, can give full phone control. Calif says human expertise was still needed end-to-end, but AI dramatically accelerated vulnerability discovery and exploit construction. The disclosure lands right after 100+ companies warned of an incoming wave of AI-powered cyberattacks.

Moonshot, the maker of chatbot Kimi, is in talks for a pre-IPO funding round at a roughly $50 billion valuation. Alibaba and Tencent are existing backers. The post doesn't disclose the round size, timeline, or lead investor. Negotiations are ongoing and terms could still change. That $50 billion figure puts it in the top tier of Chinese AI startups, but until it closes, it's just a number on the table.

Tencent is negotiating to become the largest shareholder of AI agent startup Manus, per FT. Deal terms aren't finalized—the post doesn't disclose the investment amount or valuation. Manus builds agent workflow products. If this closes, it adds another piece to Tencent's AI application layer.

Tencent is leading a deal to unwind Meta's $2bn acquisition of AI agent startup Manus. Manus builds agent products that put models into business workflows. The post only provides a headline—no deal structure, timeline, or regulatory rationale is disclosed. I'd hold off until more details surface.

Tencent officially released Hy3 under Apache 2.0. With 1/5 to 1/2 the parameters of competing flagship models, Hy3 matches or beats them on reasoning, agent, and long-context benchmarks. In a 270-person internal blind test, Hy3 scored 2.67/4 vs GLM5.1's 2.51/4. Hallucination rate dropped from 12.5% to 5.4%, multi-turn error rate from 17.4% to 7.9%. WorkBuddy task completion jumped from 72% to 90%, with 34% less time. API pricing: ¥1/M input tokens, ¥4/M output, ¥0.25 cached. The post does not disclose exact parameter count or training details.

NVIDIA's ENPIRE lets physical robots self-improve through trial and error like coding agents, hitting 99% on tasks like GPU insertion and zip-tie cutting. The catch: auto-evaluation and auto-reset still break on harder tasks. Tencent open-sourced ARGUS, an always-on tracing system for 10k+ GPU training clusters, already battle-tested for six months. A separate law paper points out that top minds badly misjudged nuclear fission and the internet—today's AI hot takes will likely age just as poorly.

WeChat rolled out XiaoWei, an AI assistant that generates lightweight front-end tools like checklists and mood trackers from a single prompt. It ships with five constraints: tools are private, unshareable, can't connect to payments, run on WeChat's own WeLM model instead of Hunyuan, and the entry sits in an inconspicuous corner. The design deliberately keeps AI on the personal-agent side to avoid platform distribution. Ant Group's LingGuang took the opposite path, encouraging users to publish AI-generated mini-apps to a public square—over 30 million so far. WeChat fears shareable AI-generated apps would become a moderation nightmare and disrupt its 8.4 million mini-program developers. The unresolved tension: when XiaoWei picks Meituan over JD.com for a milk tea search, neither users nor developers know the ranking logic. The five constraints are right, but a transparency layer is missing. Payment and transaction tasks are offloaded to WorkBuddy on desktop; XiaoWei can't handle multi-step transactions like placing orders or booking appointments.

DeepSeek raised over 50 billion yuan (~$7.4B) in its first external round, hitting a valuation above $50B. The deal structure is unusual: investors put money into a limited partnership managed by CEO Liang Wenfeng, get no voting rights, and face a five-year lock-up. China's state-backed AI fund is the only direct investor with voting rights. Liang himself put in about 20 billion yuan. Tencent and CATL are the largest outside backers. Liang told investors he prioritizes foundational AI research and AGI over short-term profits, and plans to keep building open-source models. DeepSeek's V4 Pro is roughly 11x cheaper on input and 35x cheaper on output than OpenAI's GPT-5.5. The $50B valuation is still modest next to OpenAI and Anthropic, both approaching the trillion-dollar mark.

Tencent is testing a WeChat-embedded AI Agent that opens via a right swipe and uses natural-language commands to call millions of Mini Programs for tasks such as ordering coffee. WeChat also partnered with Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo on A2A assistant capabilities, and released developer access guidance on June 8.

Yao Shunyu said at Tencent Cloud’s AI industry application conference that Hunyuan 3 rebuilt pretraining and reinforcement-learning infrastructure, changed data and evaluation, and assigned its strongest post-training staff to improve Yuanbao first; he named coding agents, multimodality, and embodied AI as Tencent’s next focus areas.

Dowson Tong said Tencent generated most of its code with AI this year, while engineers spent more time on architecture design and regularly guided and corrected AI outputs. Tencent invested 18 billion yuan in AI new products last year, and President Martin Lau said this year’s spending will at least double.

The chat group daily says Microsoft released MAI-Thinking-1 with 35B active parameters and about 1T MoE, matching Opus 4.6 on SWE-Bench Pro and scoring 97% on AIME 2025.

DeepSeek plans to raise about RMB 50 billion in its first funding round, with post-money valuation expected at RMB 350 billion to RMB 400 billion; Liang Wenfeng, Tencent, and CATL plan to invest RMB 20 billion, RMB 10 billion, and RMB 5 billion respectively.

Meituan CEO Wang Xing said Xiao Mei will connect with Tencent Yuanbao, routing local service requests into food ordering, delivery, and related Meituan scenarios; Meituan reported Q1 2026 revenue of RMB 91.039 billion and a net loss of RMB 6.827 billion.

Tencent Games unveiled Code Craft, an AI game creation platform that turns natural-language prompts into runnable 2D or 3D games, with a planning knowledge base, Skill system, visual tuning panels, and more than 20,000 free cloud assets; the post does not disclose release timing, pricing, model details, or supported engines.

Yi-Ling Liu compares U.S. and Chinese AI anxiety through labor, companionship, and agency: over 70% of U.S. teenagers report using chatbots as companions, while China is projected to reach 200 million single-person households by 2030.