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DeepSeek ships Harness v0.1, updates V4-Pro, and quadruples V4 API prices in a single day

The Hangzhou lab is now competing on the agent-runtime layer — and no longer on price alone.

By Iris Holloway · Tools & frameworks ·

DeepSeek shipped an open-source coding agent, refreshed its flagship model, and quadrupled its API prices on Thursday, all inside the same news cycle. The Hangzhou lab that made its name undercutting everyone on tokens is now telling the market it wants to be judged on something else.

DeepSeek Harness v0.1, released on GitHub under an MIT license with a dsh CLI, is a direct shot at Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. It’s built on the Cordis plugin framework, and DeepSeek describes the guiding principle bluntly: “Everything is a plugin”. Repo inspection, file edits, shell execution, web search, subagent delegation, approval policies, all pluggable. The company also stood up a “DeepSeek Harness Team” WeChat account and posted job listings for the effort, per Bloomberg.

Alongside Harness, the updated V4-Pro landed on DeepSeek’s web app, mobile client, and API with native OpenAI Responses API and Codex integration. V4-Pro had quietly been updated late Wednesday for what the company called “better agentic capabilities”. The sequencing isn’t accidental: the model was pre-positioned for the runtime that shipped a day later.

Then came the pricing. Starting 16:00 UTC on Aug. 16, V4-Flash output rises from $0.28 to $1.32 per million tokens at peak; V4-Pro output goes from $0.87 to $3.96. V4-Pro cache-miss input tokens climb from $0.435 to $1.32, a top-end increase north of 1,100%, according to Quartz. Off-peak is half peak; peak windows are 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC. DeepSeek framed the change, in a note to users, as an effort “to allocate resources more reasonably”.

Even after the hike, Anthropic’s Fable 5 sits at $50 per million output tokens. DeepSeek isn’t abandoning its price advantage; it’s harvesting some of it. With an IPO reportedly being prepared as soon as this year, the price sheet is now a document with two audiences.

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