DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab that sparked a global price war in early 2026, announced significant API price increases for its V4 models on August 6. The flagship V4-Pro output token price will jump to $3.96 per million tokens during peak hours, a 4.5x increase from the current $0.87 rate. A new peak and off-peak billing structure will take effect on August 16. DeepSeek’s price hike will ripple across China’s AI market, as the company had set the industry price floor after a 75% cut in May 2026, forcing competitors like Alibaba’s Qwen and Baidu’s Ernie to match or undercut its rates. Developers building on DeepSeek’s APIs have ten days to prepare before the new billing structure takes effect.
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