DeepSeek Routes All V4-Pro API Traffic to Faster, Cheaper Flash Model
DeepSeek began redirecting all requests sent to its flagship V4-Pro model to the newer V4.1-Flash starting September 14, 2026, while V4.1-Pro remains without a release date. The company justified the move by citing benchmark results showing V4.1-Flash outperforms V4-Pro on capability, speed, and cost across most agentic and coding tasks. V4.1-Flash also surpassed competing models from Anthropic and OpenAI on Terminal-Bench 2.1, despite being priced under one dollar per million tokens. However, the newer model showed measurable regressions in factual knowledge benchmarks, including a notable drop on SimpleQA from 55.2 to 42.3. The shift contrasts with rivals Z.ai, which maintains both flagship and Flash tiers, and Moonshot, which focuses solely on a single large-scale model.
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