China has launched a low-cost offensive in the artificial intelligence (AI) model sector. While the United States has taken the lead in the AI race with overwhelming performance differences, China is pushing forward with a cost-effective strategy, offering decent performance at significantly lower prices.
Chinese company DeepSeek announced on the 23rd that it will provide its latest flagship AI model, ‘V4 Pro,’ at a price equivalent to 75% of the launch price. DeepSeek had been running a discount promotion since launching the V4 model last April and has decided to permanently maintain the discounted price.
The price of V4 Pro is as low as $0.0036 per million input tokens, which are the smallest units AI uses when processing text, and $0.87 per million output tokens, which are the responses generated by AI. OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-5.5, costs $5 for 1 million input tokens and $30 for output tokens. DeepSeek is widening the price gap to an unparalleled level compared to U.S. AI models.
DeepSeek’s V4 Pro ranked among the world’s best in ‘the amount of intelligence obtainable per dollar’ evaluated by Artificial Analysis. To conduct the ‘AI Index’ test, which competes on various performance metrics of AI models, V4 Pro requires $268, while OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest models, GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7, cost 12 and 19 times more, respectively.
Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, SCMP, evaluated, “DeepSeek’s move demonstrates that Chinese companies are entering the AI competition with a different approach from U.S. firms, which generate profits by offering advanced model features at high prices.” Chinese AI companies are competing by offering decent AI performance at low prices. In the ranking of intelligence provided by AI relative to price, Chinese models such as MiniMax’s M 2.7 and Xiaomi’s Mimo V2.5 Pro also secured high positions. Alibaba also announced last week that it will start a promotion, reducing the price of its latest model, Qwen 3.7 Max, by 50% until June 22.
Originally written by: Rora Oh
Image credit: Reuters-Yonhap
Source: The Chosun Daily
Published on: 25 May 2026
Link to original article: DeepSeek Launches Low-Cost AI Offensive Against U.S. Rivals
