DeepSeek’s AI model identified as cheapest among leading models, and the ripple effects are hitting markets

DeepSeek’s latest AI model is the cheapest to run among well-known models. The cost gap isn’t marginal. The numbers that spooked Wall Street DeepSeek’s R1 model, which launched in January 2025, operates at roughly $0.14 per million tokens. For context, OpenAI’s comparable offering was priced at $7.50 per million tokens at the time. That’s a 98% cost reduction. The more recent V4-Pro model, which debuted in April 2026, comes in at $0.87 per million tokens for output and $0.435 for input. Those numbers represent a 34x reduction compared to leading rivals. The company has since locked in those prices permanently as of late May 2026. Then there’s the V4-Flash variant, targeting budget-conscious workloads at around $0.14 per million tokens. That’s claimed to be 35x cheaper than GPT-5.5 alternatives. Third-party analyses have confirmed that DeepSeek models broadly run 20 to 50x cheaper than leading closed models. The V4-Pro Max sits at the premium end of DeepSeek’s lineup with a blended price of roughly $2.17 per million tokens, confirmed by multiple benchmarking providers. The V4-Pro’s performance benchmarks rival Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.5, two of the most capable models on the market...