Anything you can do I can do better...
That may as well be the motto for the AI arms race, which is unfolding across multiple dimensions in 2026. There's the competition between Silicon Valley AI labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, the race for chips and compute power, and, of course, the fierce competition between the U.S. and China.
In the latest salvo in the East vs. West battle for AI supremacy, Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek has released a preview of its latest model, DeepSeek V4.
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Here's what we know about the new model, and how it stacks up against other new models like OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7.
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What is DeepSeek V4?
DeepSeek V4 Preview is a new open-source AI model. And that's the biggest difference between DeepSeek and its rivals from U.S. companies — it's a true open-source model.
Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and other U.S. companies fiercely protect their frontier models, whereas DeepSeek is available for anyone to download and modify under an MIT license.
Two versions of the new open-source model are available for use. Users can also access the new models via chat.deepseek.com.
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DeepSeek-V4-Pro: A 1.6-trillion parameter model
DeepSeek-V4-Flash: 284-billion parameter total
DeepSeek cements China's edge in open-source AI.
Just days before the launch of DeepSeek V4, another Chinese AI company, Moonshot AI, released the open-source model Kimi K2.6, though early testers say DeepSeek V4 is clearly the better model. The full system card is available via Hugging Face.
DeepSeek V4: Performance and benchmarks
DeepSeek says its newest open model makes great strides in agentic tasks and coding. The company also says "DeepSeek-V4 is seamlessly integrated with leading AI agents like Claude Code, OpenClaw & OpenCode."
DeepSeek released benchmark results that indicate the new models achieve similar results as the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
DeepSeek V4 benchmark performance comparison. Credit: DeepSeek
On popular AI leaderboards such as Arena and Artificial Analysis, DeepSeek V4 currently lags behind the top frontier models, though that could change in the days and weeks ahead.
DeepSeek V4 is far more economical than the competition
You may remember when DeepSeek burst onto the AI scene in Jan. 2025, when the company announced its R1 model. That model sent shockwaves through the U.S. AI industry by proving it was possible to build powerful models much more efficiently and cheaply.
DeepSeek V4 is also priced far lower than Gemini, ChatGPT, and Anthropic. That could give DeepSeek a huge edge in adoption.
Here's how the API pricing compares:
DeepSeek V4 costs $1.74 per 1 million input tokens and $3.48 per 1 million output tokens (1 million context window)
GPT-5.5 costs at $5 per 1 million input tokens and $30 per 1 million output tokens (1 million context window)
Claude Opus 4.7 costs at $5 per 1 million input tokens and $25 per 1 million output tokens (1 million context window)
Google Gemini 3.1 Pro costs $2 per 1 million input tokens and $12 per 1 million output tokens
As you can see, DeepSeek is about one-sixth the cost of the latest U.S. models, which is a huge edge. Even the more affordable Gemini 3.1 Pro is at a serious cost disadvantage.
So, a task that would cost you $5.22 with DeepSeek V4 would cost you $35 with GPT-5.5, or about 85 percent less.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.