DeepSeek makes 75% price cut permanent on its V4-Pro flagship
What Happened
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek converted its temporary 75% discount on V4-Pro into a permanent price, dramatically widening the price gap with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google API offerings. The move follows benchmark improvements that put V4-Pro near the frontier on coding and reasoning tasks. Analysts read the pricing as a deliberate strategic move rather than a short-term promotion.
My Take
Frontier-model pricing power is ending faster than incumbents will admit. The argument has been "but enterprises won't ship Chinese models" — which is true until a CFO sees an 80% line-item cut on a $40M API bill. Expect a wave of "model routing" startups whose entire pitch is letting buyers send 90% of traffic to DeepSeek-class models without disclosing it. Anthropic's and OpenAI's pricing floors are about to be tested.
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