DeepSeek’s Sequel Set to Extend China’s Reach in Open-Source A.I.

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The Chinese start-up DeepSeek shook the industry in January 2025 with its claim that it had created an advanced A.I. system for a fraction of what its American rivals spent.

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Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times

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DeepSeek’s Sequel Set to Extend China’s Reach in Open-Source A.I.

Chinese companies have embraced making their most advanced artificial intelligence models available to all.

The Chinese start-up DeepSeek shook the industry in January 2025 with its claim that it had created an advanced A.I. system for a fraction of what its American rivals spent.

Credit...

Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times

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By

Meaghan Tobin

and

Cade Metz

Meaghan Tobin reported from Taipei, Taiwan, and Cade Metz from San Francisco.

April 24, 2026

When the Chinese start-up DeepSeek published details about one of its artificial intelligence models last year, it sent shock waves through the tech industry.

The company said it had built its system by

spending far less

on computer chips than American rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. It marked the start of what became known as China’s “DeepSeek moment,” shorthand for the belief that Chinese A.I. companies were ready to showcase their technical capabilities to the world.

The DeepSeek moment reflected a shift in the global A.I. landscape. The change was not only about lower costs, but also openness in how the technology is shared.

DeepSeek released its models as open source, which means others can freely use and modify them. By contrast, OpenAI and Anthropic kept their leading models proprietary. The episode demonstrated that an open-source system could perform almost as well as closed versions. In the months that followed, Chinese firms released dozens of other open-source models. By the end of 2025, these models made up a significant share of global A.I. usage.

On Friday, DeepSeek released a preview of V4, its long-awaited follow-up model, which it intends to open source. The new model excels at writing computer code, an increasingly important skill for leading A.I. systems. It significantly outperformed every other open-source system at generating code, according to tests from Vals AI, a company that tracks the performance of A.I. technologies.

DeepSeek released its new model just days after Moonshot AI, another Chinese start-up, introduced its latest open-source model, Kimi 2.6. While these systems trail the coding capabilities of the leading U.S. models from Anthropic and OpenAI, the gap is narrowing.

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