China's DeepSeek rolls out a long-anticipated update of its AI model
[April 24, 2026] By
CHAN HO-HIM and MATT O'BRIEN
HONG KONG (AP) — DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence startup
that shook world markets last year, launched preview versions of its
latest major update Friday as the AI rivalry between China and the U.S.
heats up.
DeepSeek’s V4 has been keenly anticipated by users keen to test how it
compares to U.S. competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude
and Google’s Gemini. Anthropic and OpenAI have accused DeepSeek of
unfairly building its technology off their own.
Some industry analysts had expected the new model to arrive more than a
month earlier at the start of the Lunar New Year.
DeepSeek says the new V4 open-source models, which include “pro” and
“flash” versions, have big improvements in knowledge, reasoning and in
their “agentic” capabilities – the ability to perform complex tasks and
workflows autonomously.
V4 is a successor to V3, an AI model that DeepSeek released in late
2024.
But it was DeepSeek’s specialized “reasoning” AI model, called R1, that
took markets by surprise with its release in January 2025. DeepSeek
claimed it was more cost-effective than OpenAI’s similar model and it
became a symbol of how China was catching up with the U.S. in
technological advancements.
DeepSeek said the “V4 Pro Max” version has “superior performance” in
terms of standard reasoning benchmarks relative to OpenAI’s GPT-5.2
model and Google’s Gemini 3.0-Pro. It falls “marginally” short of
GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3.1-Pro, it said.
In terms of “agentic” capabilities, the Chinese company said the V4
“pro” version could outperform Claude’s Sonnet 4.5 and approaches the
level of Claude's Opus 4.5 model based on its own evaluation.
The “flash” version of V4 performs on a par with the “pro” version on
simple agent tasks and has reasoning capabilities closely approaching
it, DeepSeek said.
“Based on the benchmark results, it does appear DeepSeek V4 is going to
be very competitive against its U.S. rivals,” said Lian Jye Su, chief
analyst at the technology research and advisory group Omdia.
Marina Zhang, an associate professor at the University of Technology
Sydney, said DeepSeek's V4 rollout is as a “pivotal milestone for
China’s AI industry”, especially as global competition intensifies in
the pursuit of self-reliance in critical technologies.
[to top of second column] |
The smartphone apps DeepSeek page is seen on a smartphone screen in
Beijing, Jan. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File)
 DeepSeek offers a free‑to‑use web
and mobile chatbot. Unlike the top models from Anthropic, Google and
OpenAI, it describes its technology as “open source” in the way that
it enables developers access to modify and build on its core
technology.
Both the V4's “pro” and “flash” versions have a 1 million token
context window, a parameter of how much information an AI model can
process and recall, and run on a more efficient basis, the startup
said. That is a significant improvement from before, since the V3
supported a 128,000 token context window.
A report from Microsoft in January showed use of DeepSeek has been
gaining ground in many developing nations.
However, some analysts remain skeptical. Ivan Su, a senior equity
analyst at Morningstar, said while V4 is a “competent” follow-up,
it’s not as big a breakthrough as the rollout of R1.
“Domestic competition has intensified significantly since R1’s
release,” Su said. “Against U.S. models, DeepSeek’s own evaluation
suggests its capabilities largely match on most fronts, but
independent evaluations are needed before final conclusions can be
drawn.”
In February, Anthropic accused DeepSeek and two other China-based AI
laboratories of “industrial-scale campaigns” to “illicitly extract
Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models.” It said they did
that using a technique called distillation that “involves training a
less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.” OpenAI made
similar allegations in a letter to U.S. lawmakers.
This week, Michael Kratsios, chief science and technology adviser to
U.S. President Donald Trump, also accused foreign tech companies
“principally based in China” of distilling leading U.S. AI systems
and “exploiting American expertise and innovation.”
China’s embassy in Washington hit back at the allegations,
describing them as “unjustified suppression of Chinese companies by
the U.S.”
___
O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.
All contents © copyright 2026 Associated Press. All rights reserved
 |
