DeepSeek released V4 on April 24, 2026, a new AI model that costs roughly one-sixth as much as Claude Opus 4.7 and one-seventh the cost of GPT-5.5 for the same inference tasks. Performance is competitive with leading models on coding tasks but lags on reasoning and knowledge-recall benchmarks—a design tradeoff reflected in the pricing. For cost-sensitive teams running high-volume coding work, this shifts the economic equation; for reasoning-heavy applications, Claude and GPT models maintain meaningful advantages.