DeepSeek V4 is here: How it compares to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini

DeepSeek previewed V4, a true open-source model under the MIT license with two variants and API access.

The company says V4 improves agentic and coding performance, with benchmark claims pointing to frontier-level results.

Public leaderboards still place it behind top rivals such as GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, and Gemini 3.1 Pro.

Its biggest advantage is price: DeepSeek V4 is far cheaper per token than those leading models.

The launch could intensify U.S.-China AI competition and pressure rivals if performance holds up at lower cost.