China’s DeepSeek releases preview of long-awaited V4 model as AI race intensifies
DeepSeek reportedly has not shared its upcoming AI model with American engineers and instead granted early access to Chinese companies, further intensifying the technological war between the U.S. and China, as of Feb. 26, 2026.
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Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek on Friday released a preview version of its long-awaited V4 large language model, allowing users to test its new capabilities and features.
The release comes more than a year after DeepSeek introduced its R1 reasoning model, which rocked global tech markets due to its surprising performance and efficiency, despite reportedly being developed for much lower costs than U.S. rivals.
Similar to DeepSeek’s previous V3 model, the latest upgrade is open source, allowing developers to download the code, run it locally, and modify it.
The Hangzhou-based company claimed that V4 achieves strong performance against domestic competitors, particularly in agent-based tasks, knowledge processing and inference.
The company added that DeepSeek-V4 has been optimized for use with popular agent tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenClaw.
The model is available in both a “pro” and a “flash” version, depending on size.
Founded in 2023, DeepSeek gained attention in late 2024 with its free, open-source V3 model, which it said was trained with less powerful chips and at a fraction of the cost of models built by the likes of OpenAI and Google.
Weeks later, in January 2025, it released a reasoning model, R1, that hit similar benchmarks or outperformed many of the world’s leading LLMs.
The emergence of a globally competitive open-source model raised questions in tech markets about how the scale of spending on AI infrastructure would be impacted.
Since then, DeepSeek has released a series of model upgrades, but none have matched the impact of R1.
The company now faces growing competition in China’s booming AI sector, with players like Alibaba and ByteDance also releasing new models this year.
