China’s DeepSeek is expected to release its first flagship AI model in more than a year this week as it looks to take on US rivals like ChatGPT and Gemini.
The companies original large language model, which launched in January 2025, made headlines after topping app charts in the US, with President Donald Trump describing it as a “wake-up call” for the tech industry.
DeepSeek’s new V4 model will be “multimodal”, meaning it will be able to generate pictures, video and text, the Financial Times reported.
The Hangzhou-based startup has not shown its latest model to US chipmakers like Nvidia, according to a separate report from Reuters, instead sharing it with local suppliers like Huawei.
This breaks from standard industry practice, with new models typically shared to ensure that the software is compatible with the hardware.
The move is believed to be part of a broader strategy by the Chinese government to reduce the dominance of US chipmakers.
The arrival of DeepSeek’s R1 model in January 2025 caused shockwaves throughout the tech industry, as it marked the first time a Chinese competitor was able to rival the most advanced models from US giants.
It was also free-to-use, open-source, and developed at a fraction of the cost, leading to share prices of several technology companies to plummet.
Nvidia experienced the biggest one-day loss in market value in history, losing more than $500bn, while Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft also experienced significant drops in share price.
The company has since released more advanced models, but they are currently only available on the developer platforms Hugging Face and GitHub.
The new model’s arrival comes amid controversy surrounding the use of AI models for military purposes.
President Trump has ordered all federal agencies to stop using models developed by Anthropic after the AI firm refused to agree to demands to use its technology for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons.
OpenAI has since reached an agreement with the US Department of War to deploy its models to the Pentagon’s classified network.
