China’s DeepSeek previews new AI model a year after jolting US rivals

DeepSeek says the V4 model can compete toe-to-toe with leading American systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

by Robert Hart

Apr 24, 2026, 9:45 AM UTC

Image: The Verge Robert Hart is a London-based reporter at _The Verge_ covering all things AI and a Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for _Forbes_.

Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a preview of its hotly anticipated next-generation AI model V4 on Friday, saying that the open-source model can compete with leading closed-source systems from US rivals including Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.

DeepSeek says V4 marks a major improvement over prior models, especially in coding, a capability that has become central to AI agents and helped drive the success of tools like ChatGPT Codex and Claude Code. The release is also a milestone for China’s chip industry, with DeepSeek explicitly highlighting compatibility with domestic Huawei technology.

The release comes a year after DeepSeek rattled the US AI industry with R1, a model it claimed was trained at a fraction of the cost of leading US systems. DeepSeek has not disclosed V4’s training costs or what hardware it was trained on. US officials have accused the company of using banned Nvidia chips and Anthropic claims DeepSeek misused Claude to improve its own products.

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