China’s DeepSeek releases preview of long-awaited V4 model as AI race intensifies
DeepSeek reportedly did not share its upcoming artificial intelligence model with American engineers and instead gave early access to Chinese companies, further exacerbating the technological war between the United States and China as of February 26, 2026.
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Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek released a preview version of its long-awaited V4 large language model on Friday, allowing users to test its new capabilities and features.
This release comes more than a year after DeepSeek introduced its R1 reasoning model, which shook up global tech markets for its astonishing performance and efficiency, even though it was reportedly developed at much lower costs than its 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 the V4 achieved strong performance against domestic rivals, especially in agent-based tasks, information processing and inference.
The company added that DeepSeek-V4 is optimized for use with Anthropic’s popular intermediary tools such as Claude Code and OpenClaw.
Both “pro” and “flash” versions are available, depending on the size of the model.
Founded in 2023, DeepSeek attracted attention with its free, open-source V3 model in late 2024; This model is trained on less powerful chips and runs at a fraction of the cost of models built by OpenAI and the like, he said. Google.
Weeks later, in January 2025, he published a reasoning model called R1 that met similar criteria or outperformed many of the world’s leading LLMs.
The emergence of a globally competitive open source model has raised questions about how it will affect the scale of spending on AI infrastructure in technology markets.
Since then, DeepSeek has released a number of model upgrades, but none have achieved the impact of R1.
The company currently faces growing competition in China’s burgeoning AI sector from players such as: Alibaba’s and ByteDance is also releasing new models this year.
