Tech war: China advances in AI agentic tools as Tencent, ByteDance weigh in


China is making progress in artificial intelligence “agentic frameworks”, the tools required to make AI agents, as the country’s tech giants begin to take on US players such as AutoGen and OpenAI Swarm.

Tencent Holdings was the latest to join the fray after the Shenzhen-based company open-sourced its new Youtu-Agent agentic framework on Tuesday. Developed by Youtu Labs, Tencent’s AI research department, the framework was released on Microsoft’s open-source code-hosting platform GitHub last week.

The company said that a Youtu-Agent agent built on the open-source DeepSeek-V3.1 model achieved a score of 71.47 per cent on WebWalkerQA, a web traversal benchmark.

The move followed ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, which open-sourced its agent development platform, Coze Studio, in July. Meanwhile, Alibaba Group Holding open-sourced its agent framework Qwen-Agent in March.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen. Photo: AFP
Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen. Photo: AFP

Agentic frameworks are software platforms that provide the tools and components to build, deploy and manage AI agents. Agents, such as Chinese start-up Butterfly Effect’s Manus and OpenAI’s Operator, are capable of autonomously performing complex tasks for users by planning and executing a series of subtasks.

  • Related Posts

    Chinese start-up DeepSeek teams with Tencent, HKU on AI tool to sharpen 3D design

    The team proposed Pointer-CAD, a framework built on Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen 2.5 model, which helps designers select edges or faces of a 3D object, increasing the accuracy and efficiency…

    Continue reading
    As the world’s wealthy relocate, rewriting the property map, will Hong Kong win out?

    From Sydney to Hong Kong, wealth migration is reshaping the global super-luxury property market as activity picks up after two subdued years – though the dominance of relative newcomer Dubai…

    Continue reading

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *