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

    Trump says Spain backed down after US trade threat amid Nato rift – Firstpost

    US President Donald Trump claimed Spain had backed down after he threatened to halt trade with the Nato ally, saying Madrid agreed to make additional payments following a sharp public…

    Continue reading
    Oil surges over 5% as US launches fresh strikes on Iran, fears of wider West Asia conflict rattle markets – Firstpost

    Oil prices climbed sharply on Thursday, extending gains in post-settlement trade after the United States launched a fresh wave of military strikes against Iran, intensifying fears of a wider conflict…

    Continue reading

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published.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