Marina Zhang, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, said DeepSeek’s V4 rollout is a “pivotal milestone for China’s AI industry”, especially as global competition intensifies in the pursuit of self-reliance in critical technologies.
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 US 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 US lawmakers.
This week, Michael Kratsios, chief science and technology adviser to US President Donald Trump, also accused foreign tech companies “principally based in China” of distilling leading US 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 US”
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