Amid the rapidly intensifying AI race between the US and China, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has launched a powerful new code-generation AI model called V4 Flash. V4 Flash is an open-weight AI model, available under the permissive MIT License which allows for free commercial use, modification, and local deployment. Its model weights are hosted on platforms like Hugging Face. However, V4 Flash’s biggest draw is likely its usage costs. DeepSeek charges about 28 cents for the same amount of coding output that costs $25 on Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 model, making the Chinese open-weight model about 99 per cent cheaper to use.