AI startup DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng. Photo: VCG

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek officially unveiled the official version of DeepSeek V4 Pro on Thursday, featuring significantly enhanced agent capabilities and support for the Responses Application Programming Interface (API) and Codex integration.

As more Chinese and overseas AI firms release increasingly advanced AI models, competition is getting fierce; however, Chinese models, represented by DeepSeek, remain highly competitive given their technological advances and relatively low costs, analysts noted.

Users can now access the new V4 Pro model on the mobile apps, web interface, and API, by selecting "Expert Mode" on these platforms, the company said in a statement on its WeChat account

Just a day earlier, on Wednesday night, DeepSeek updated its API documentation, replacing the preview edition of its V4 Pro model with a new version, DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, marking the formal rollout of the API version of DeepSeek V4 Pro.

According to the company, the updated model offers a 1 million-token context window, a maximum output length of 384,000 tokens, and supports both thinking and non-thinking modes.

The launch of the new model comes as AI developers increasingly shift from simple chat functions toward longer, multi-step workflows that rely on tool use, code execution, and persistent task completion. Those workloads consume far more tokens than traditional conversational apps, making pricing and inference efficiency increasingly important.

DeepSeek also released benchmark charts showing strong performances across several agent-focused tests, including terminal operation, code engineering, tool use and security-related tasks. In some cases, the V4 Pro 0813 approached or even surpassed leading overseas models, the company said.

Based on information released by the company on Thursday, the DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 delivers performance approaching that of Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 on benchmark tests. Benchmark results showed V4 Pro-0813 scored 87.9 on Terminal-Bench, a test designed to measure how well AI agents perform tasks in terminal environments, narrowly trailing Fable 5's score of 88.

The pricing has also drawn attention. DeepSeek has priced DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 at 3 yuan ($0.44) per million input tokens and 6 yuan per million output tokens, with cached input priced at 0.025 yuan per million tokens. 

The update quickly drew attention from industry analysts. Research firm SemiAnalysis posted on X congratulating DeepSeek on the release of V4-Pro-0813 and said that the model "massively beats Nemotron 3 Ultra on agentic tasks."

Notably, Elon Musk's AI company xAI on Wednesday released Grok 4.6, a new frontier model designed for long-running agents and visual work. Grok 4.6 is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.  

According to xAI, it achieves frontier intelligence across several agentic coding and knowledge work benchmarks, and matches GPT-5.6 Sol on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.

The near-simultaneous releases of DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 and Grok 4.6 show that the AI industry is entering a new phase of competition. Frontier models are no longer defined only by parameter scale or conversational ability, but increasingly by the ability of AI systems to independently use tools, write and execute code and complete multi-step tasks, according to Tian Feng, former dean of SenseTime's Intelligence Industry Research Institute.

As application demand expands, model providers face growing pressure to maintain technical advances while keeping prices attractive, Tian told the Global Times on Thursday, adding that for frontier AI companies, the next competitive edge may depend less on who answers better in chat, and more on who can complete complex real-world tasks at lower cost and with higher reliability.

According to media reports, DeepSeek has indicated that it might raise API prices overall, saying on August 6 that it planned a "relatively significant" increase, though it has not disclosed the exact timing or scope of any changes. The statement has drawn attention to the company's broader commercial strategy. Analysts said that DeepSeek may eventually adopt a more granular pricing structure to balance rising inference costs with commercial returns.

Analysts noted that DeepSeek's price remains highly competitive among frontier models, particularly for agentic and coding workloads that often require large token consumption. Compared with overseas models, even if the company raises its prices, it still has substantial room for price adjustment while maintaining competitive capabilities. 

It also comes as demand for coding and agent applications continues to rise. Data from China's National Data Administration in March showed that daily token usage in the country had surpassed 140 trillion, more than 1,000 times the level seen at the beginning of 2024, the Shanghai Securities News reported.