DEEPSEEK V4 PRO
1.6T total parameters, 49B active per token. 1,000,000 token context. Strong reasoning and coding. $1.74/$3.48 per million tokens — fraction of US frontier pricing.
DeepSeek V4 Pro is DeepSeek's frontier model and one of the most aggressive price-to-capability points in the 2026 lineup. It's a 1.6 trillion parameter Mixture-of-Experts architecture that activates 49B parameters per forward pass, paired with a 1,000,000 token context window — the same scale Gemini 3 Pro ships. Reasoning and coding benchmarks land in the same ballpark as GPT-5.5 on many tests, with notable strength on math and Chinese-language tasks. Standard pricing (post the May 31, 2026 launch discount) is $1.74 per million input tokens and $3.48 per million output. That undercuts GPT-5.5 by roughly 3x on input and ~9x on output, and undercuts Claude Opus 4.7 dramatically. The case for: massive-context retrieval, code generation at scale, math-heavy reasoning, and any council where you want a non-US-aligned third voice. The case against: agent loops where GPT-5.5 tool stability still wins, and tasks where data-residency considerations matter (DeepSeek is Chinese-headquartered).
DeepSeek launched V4 Pro with a temporary discount that expired May 31, 2026. The $1.74 / $3.48 per million tokens shown here is the standard post-launch rate. Earlier published numbers below the launch discount no longer apply. Council AI bundles V4 Pro inside monthly plan budgets at the standard rate.
DeepSeek V4 Pro routes each token through only a subset of its 1.6T total parameters — about 49B activate per forward pass. This is how MoE architectures get frontier-scale quality at much lower inference cost than a dense model of equivalent quality would need.
$1.74 per million input tokens and $3.48 per million output. This is the standard rate post the May 31, 2026 launch-discount expiry.
DeepSeek has historically released open-weight variants of its models. Check DeepSeek's release notes for the current open-weight posture of V4 Pro specifically; Council AI uses the hosted API.
V4 Pro is the flagship — slower, smarter, and the one to pick when you want maximum capability. V4 Flash is the cheap, fast sibling for high-volume work where you don't need the heavy reasoning.
Two reasons: (1) a non-US-aligned voice often catches things GPT/Claude/Gemini all miss because of similar training-data biases, and (2) the price makes it cheap to add as a third opinion.
Yes — natively. Coherence across the full window is competitive with Gemini 3 Pro on long-context benchmarks like RULER.
DeepSeek is headquartered in China. If your compliance posture excludes Chinese providers, swap in Mistral Large 3 (EU) or stick to US-headquartered providers.