StepFun announced on October 12, 2026, that its flagship Step 5 Preview model was available in Tencent’s WorkBuddy office agent, with exclusive free access through October 25. The announcement established a limited promotion—not permanent free use or guaranteed continued availability.
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What the WorkBuddy integration means
The integration makes Step 5 Preview available inside WorkBuddy, rather than only through a developer-facing API. WorkBuddy includes office-oriented features such as Office AI editing and scheduled tasks, but the announcement does not specify which of those workflows support Step 5 Preview.
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WorkBuddy also has a mobile app. However, the available reporting does not confirm that Step 5 Preview was selectable on every mobile client during the promotion.
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Free access ended October 25; future terms were not stated
StepFun described the October 12–25 period as exclusive free access on WorkBuddy. It did not announce a post-promotion price or confirm that Step 5 Preview would remain a permanent WorkBuddy option.
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That distinction matters: the promotion confirms when users could try the model in WorkBuddy, but it does not establish WorkBuddy’s later commercial terms. StepFun’s separate API pricing, where available, would not by itself determine the price of access through WorkBuddy.
Step 5 Preview: launch and capabilities
StepFun introduced Step 5 Preview on September 20 as a flagship model for agentic work, including software engineering and professional knowledge work, with particular emphasis on finance. The company describes it as a sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) model with 600 billion total parameters and about 27 billion active per token. It supports a 1-million-token context window; StepFun’s documentation lists text, image and video input.
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Those are model specifications, not proof that every capability is available through the WorkBuddy integration. The October 12 announcement confirms availability in WorkBuddy but does not provide a detailed feature-by-feature account of how the model handles documents, spreadsheets or other tasks there.
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The hosted trial and the released weights are different routes
StepFun released Step 5 Preview’s weights on October 15, within the WorkBuddy free-access window. The release gave developers a separate route to download the model, while the WorkBuddy integration offered access through an office-agent product.
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Downloading model weights is not the same as using the hosted WorkBuddy integration: it does not, on its own, establish that running the model is free, or clarify WorkBuddy’s pricing after October 25. The practical takeaway is straightforward: the announcement opened a temporary in-product trial, while the model’s longer-term availability and WorkBuddy terms remained unspecified.
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