AIDeepSeek V4 Signals a New Phase in the U.S.-China AI Rivalry
The latest Chinese model trails U.S. competitors on benchmarks. But it may not have to win the performance race to reshape the geopolitics of artificial intelligence.
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek released a version of its long-awaited V4 large language model on Friday. It’s the most significant update since the release of the version that rattled global tech markets more than a year ago. Like DeepSeek’s previous models, V4 is open source, meaning it is available for anyone to download, use, and modify. The company claims the new model rivals leading closed-source systems from American firms—like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini—on major benchmarks, while outperforming its rival open-source models.
The release has again trained attention on the intensifying U.S.-China AI competition. Adding to the tension, the White House’s science and technology office has accused foreign entities—primarily Chinese ones—of conducting large-scale efforts to extract knowledge from U.S. frontier AI models, a broadside widely seen as directed at DeepSeek.
Three CFR fellows assessed the new DeepSeek model and considered what it could mean for the U.S.-Chinese AI race.
DeepSeek V4 Shows the U.S. AI Lead Is Holding—and U.S. Export Controls Are Working
Chris McGuire is a senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
DeepSeek has released its long-awaited new model, DeepSeek V4—its first new-architecture model since the release of R1 in January 2025. Whereas R1 stoked alarm that China was catching up to the United States in AI, and even briefly tanked U.S. stock markets, V4 has produced a more muted reaction. This new DeepSeek model is not competitive with frontier U.S. models. And while it is likely the best available open-source option, it does not provide evidence that Chinese AI firms are shrinking the gap with the United States.
DeepSeek’s own technical paper concedes that V4’s reasoning and agentic capabilities are comparable to GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.0 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.5—models released roughly half a year ago. DeepSeek even explicitly acknowledges that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.” That gap is broadly consistent with estimates that the United States has roughly a seven-month lead over China. The actual gap may also be widening, as U.S. AI firms use AI to accelerate next-generation model development. The newest U.S. models announced in April—Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5—both show significant performance gains over their predecessors.
