Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common malignancies worldwide. Extracellular vesicles (EV) are critical mediators of intercellular communication within the tumor microenvironment, and cancer-cell-secreted EVs often facilitate cancer progression. Here we show that in HBV-associated HCC, tumor-cell-derived EVs contain a TGFβ-inducible long noncoding RNA, termed HDAC2-AS2. EVs enriched with HDAC2-AS2 facilitate cancer progression by suppressing cytotoxicity of intra-tumor CD8