China's AI Knife Fight: DeepSeek's New Model Runs 100x Cheaper Than Anthropic's Flagship

The price of artificial intelligence just printed a new low. DeepSeek's V4-Flash, officially released Friday, costs roughly three cents to run through a standard battery of benchmark tests, according to San Francisco research firm Artificial Analysis. Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 costs 86 cents; OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, $1.86; and Anthropic's Claude Fable 5, the industry's top-scoring model, $3.15. In realized terms, the Chinese model is more than 100 times cheaper to run than the American flagship, according to Reuters.

V4-Flash is the cheapest well-known model in the world, and by a wide margin. The figure is even more striking because of a detail buried in the firm's write-up: V4-Flash is unusually verbose. It consumes tokens heavily and still lands at three cents. The per-token price is doing all the work.

The same firm supplies the caveat. V4-Flash scores 50 out of 100 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a composite of nine benchmarks spanning coding, reasoning, and workplace tasks. That ties Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash and puts it one point behind Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 and Zhipu's GLM-5.2. Moonshot's Kimi K3 scores 57, while Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 and Fable 5, along with OpenAI's GPT-5.6, score at least READ MORE AT SOURCE »