The WorkBuddy education public-benefit edition was announced on October 19, 2026 by Tencent SSV, Tencent's sustainable social value division, and is open to teachers across China: once an account is activated, each teacher can claim 2,000 credits per month for 12 consecutive months, with no restrictions by region or school level. Credits are automatically topped up on the first of each month, and teachers who use them up can still continue with free models rather than being cut off mid-work.
What teachers get is not just another chat box
Compared with the standard edition, the public-benefit edition adds a layer of content prepared specifically for teaching. Tencent SSV and the WorkBuddy team worked with universities including Peking University and Beijing Normal University to turn research on lesson design, courseware design, open-class refinement, tiered instruction, home-school communication and student psychology into more than 100 directly callable education experts, which are rolling out progressively. There are also five tools — creative teaching, scripted classrooms, courseware production, animated demonstrations and material processing — where teachers describe what they need in plain language and get a first draft. Later versions plan to connect Tencent Docs, the Lexiang knowledge base and ima, bringing lesson plans, resource libraries and collaborative editing into one workflow. Teachers apply through the Tencent SSV WeChat official account menu, submit teacher identity information, and are activated within three working days after approval.
This is not the same as the back-to-school credit giveaway
This is not Tencent's first credit handout to teachers. During the September back-to-school season, WorkBuddy offered 1,000 credits to verified teachers and students, and in Laizhou, Shandong, the local education bureau equipped more than 6,000 primary and secondary school teachers with AI assistants, alongside 33 education experts and 15 teaching skills. That round looked more like a limited-time campaign aimed at getting teachers started. What changed this time is the scale and the form: the monthly allowance doubled to 2,000 credits, the period stretches to a full year, the expert roster grows past 100, and a permanent public-benefit edition carries the offer instead of a campaign that ends. WorkBuddy has been pushing into industry scenarios for months — when StepFun's Step 5 Preview landed on WorkBuddy the headline was model capability, while the education edition takes a different route: first take over the lesson plans, courseware and communication materials teachers must produce every day.
Credits solve the entry ticket, not classroom results
Teachers as a group have limited willingness to pay for AI tools, and school procurement cycles are long, so free credits effectively remove the first barrier. But after the credits are handed out, three other things decide whether this edition sticks. First, expert quality: whether the 100-plus education experts are genuinely tuned by subject and grade level, or just renamed generic prompts — teachers can tell after two uses. Second, verification cost: if AI-generated courseware and tiered exercises contain a non-trivial error rate, the time teachers spend checking them can cancel out the time saved, so generated content can only serve as a draft, never go straight into the classroom. Third, data boundaries: home-school communication and student psychology materials involve minors' information, and no clear school-level usage rules have been published alongside the edition. For individual teachers, the edition is worth claiming and trying, especially for high-frequency repetitive work like lesson preparation and courseware production; but waiting for the school's position before entering student information into any AI tool is the safer order of operations.
