The mysterious Hy3 LLM is topping OpenRouter Model Rankings by a large margin

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’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.…