DeepSeek Readies V4 Coding-Focused AI Model for Mid-February Launch

DeepSeek is preparing to introduce V4, a next-generation artificial intelligence model the company is positioning as primarily focused on coding, sources familiar with the matter say. The startup is targeting a mid-February rollout timed broadly around Lunar New Year, a schedule that reflects the firm’s prior pattern of high-profile releases designed to capture attention during the holiday period.

People close to DeepSeek describe V4 as emphasizing advanced programming proficiency, with internal tests suggesting the model may outperform leading rivals on coding tasks. Those tests reportedly compare V4’s capabilities against prominent alternatives in the market and indicate particular strength in processing and generating responses to very long coding prompts. That capability would be significant for developers working on large, complex codebases where context length and the ability to reason over extended sequences of code materially affect productivity.

DeepSeek’s model development appears to represent a deliberate shift from earlier reasoning-focused breakthroughs toward a design optimized for software development use cases. Internally, company engineers have framed coding proficiency as a primary benchmark of enterprise utility, and V4 is being built with that criterion at the forefront. If the internal performance claims are borne out by independent benchmarks, V4 could strengthen DeepSeek’s position as a lower-cost alternative to closed-source models developed by U.S.-based firms and other competitors.

The planned timing closely follows the playbook DeepSeek used last year, when its R1 model launched in late January ahead of the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday and drew outsized attention. The firm previously attracted global notice for DeepSeek-V3 and the R1 release, and it publicly described earlier this year that it had built a lower-cost rival to ChatGPT-style systems. Market watchers say investor sensitivity to DeepSeek’s cadence of releases is real: prior model launches temporarily affected trading in related technology stocks as markets reassessed competitive dynamics.

Sources differ on the company’s headquarters, with some describing DeepSeek as based in Hangzhou and others referring to Beijing, underscoring the opaque nature of certain private AI startups. The company has also faced scrutiny in some jurisdictions over security and privacy practices, adding a regulatory dimension to any international adoption of its systems.

Claims about V4 currently rest on unnamed sources and on internal testing reported by those sources. The timeline is described as fluid, and the performance assertions have not been independently verified. Analysts caution that third-party benchmarks and direct access to the model will be necessary to assess how V4 performs on standardized coding evaluations and in real-world developer workflows.

A confirmed release, independent evaluations and clarification of deployment safeguards would shape how deeply V4 can penetrate enterprise markets and influence the broader AI arms race. For now, DeepSeek’s announced focus on code highlights a sharpening competition over applied capabilities that matter directly to software teams and the companies that employ them.