Deepseek: Aggressive discounting puts pressure on Anthropic and OpenAI

On April 24th, the Chinese AI developer Deepseek announced its new AI model Deepseek V4 in the Pro and Flash variants and followed up with a temporary price reduction for the Pro model. The 75 percent discount promotion was actually supposed to end on May 31, 2026.

Deepseek V4-Pro: Price drops to a quarter

But the Chinese AI developer has now let it be known via X that the price reduction should be permanent. This means that the API prices for Deepseek V4-Pro are only a quarter of the original costs, as Deepseek says.

According to the corresponding price website, the price range per million input tokens is now only $0.003625 to $0.435 instead of the previous range of $0.0145 to $1.74. The cost of one million output tokens is $0.87 instead of the previous $3.48.

Anthropic and OpenAI significantly more expensive

The price reduction is particularly notable when compared to the prices of western competitors, as The Next Web writes. Accordingly, OpenAI charges $2.5 per million input and ten dollars per million output tokens for its GPT-5 AI model. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 costs five or 25 dollars.

The aggressive discount, which has now become a permanent fixture, shows that Deepseek is prioritizing increasing market share over potentially increasing sales, according to The Next Web. The Chinese company had described the V4 launch as the “era of cost-effective one million context length”.

Companies could save a lot

Deepseek wants to score points with its new top model and the particularly large context window, especially in the corporate sector, where it is important to process extensive documents and code as well as conversation histories. The costs for the tokens required for this add up quickly. Companies could generate big savings by switching to Deepseek.

Salesforce, for example, has announced that it will spend around $300 million in token costs in 2026 to use Anthropic’s AI tools. If the US software company were to instead use the Deepseek model and the corresponding significantly cheaper tokens, Salesforce could save a large part of this amount.

Geopolitical and technical risks

However, geopolitical and technical risks speak against the use of Deepseek, as stated by The Next Web. Many companies in the USA and Europe will probably find it difficult to have sensitive business or customer data processed by a Chinese AI provider.