DeepSeek Releases Flagship V4-Pro Model in Challenge to Kimi K3
The launch of DeepSeek’s most advanced model, which costs only a fraction of other popular Chinese models, further intensifies the market competition.
Chinese AI developer DeepSeek on Wednesday launched the official version of its most advanced model, V4-Pro, which offers capabilities comparable to Moonshot AI’s popular Kimi K3 model on some benchmarks at much lower prices.
DeepSeek’s latest release further intensifies the competition among increasingly powerful Chinese open-source models and U.S. frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI. A leaderboard compiled by U.S. AI benchmarking startup Vals AI ranks V4-Pro second among all open-source models, just behind Kimi K3.
DeepSeek is offering V4-Pro at a fraction of the price of Kimi K3, which is already significantly cheaper than U.S. frontier models. The application programming interface for V4-Pro costs only $0.435 for input and $0.87 for output per 1 million tokens. By comparison, Moonshot’s Kimi K3 charges $3 for input and $15 for output, while Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 costs $5 for input and $25 for output.
DeepSeek is setting the prices of V4-Pro remarkably low, even though the company recently said it was planning a “significant increase” in the near future in the overall API pricing for its AI models.