On August 12, 2026, DeepSeek released its production V4 Pro model at $0.87 per million output tokens, undercutting SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6, which launched the same day at $6 per million output tokens. DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng shipped V4 Pro after roughly four months of preview, while Elon Musk's SpaceXAI simultaneously released Grok 4.6, with both models aimed at long-horizon autonomous agent work.
DeepSeek's pricing is particularly aggressive: input costs $0.435 per million tokens on a cache miss and as low as $0.003625 on a cache hit. Grok 4.6 lists $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, with fast mode and long-context requests priced higher. The V4 Pro is a mixture-of-experts system with 1.6 trillion total parameters, 49 billion active per token, trained on more than 32 trillion tokens, a 1 million-token context window, and a 384,000-token output ceiling. Its open weights were downloaded over 1.4 million times on Hugging Face in a month.
Benchmarks show V4 Pro leading on several automation and security tasks. It scored 83.3 on CyberGym, ahead of Fable 5 at 83.1 and Claude Opus 4.8 at 78.3. It also reached 31.8 on AutomationBench and 87.9 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, outperforming Claude Opus 4.8 but narrowly trailing Fable 5. Grok 4.6 posted 1,753 Elo on GDPVal-AA v2 and tied GPT-5.6 Sol at 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. In a Flappy Bird build comparison, V4 Pro used 20,000+ tokens for $0.019, while Grok 4.6 used about 5,000 tokens but cost $0.03.
For crypto and DeFi applications, the cost difference is substantial. A workload producing 100 million output tokens per month would cost about $87 on DeepSeek V4 Pro, compared to roughly $2,500 on Claude Opus 4.7 or $3,000 on GPT-5.5. This makes always-on DeFi agents monitoring positions, executing multi-step trades, and running automation economically viable for smaller strategies that lose money on Western AI models. DeepSeek has cautioned that a significant increase in API pricing is coming, so the current floor may not last. OpenRouter lists DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 as live. At a staff address, Musk said AI revenue would eclipse all other SpaceX lines combined in September and represent 99% of the company's value within five years.
