DeepSeek launches 1.6 trillion parameter V4 on Huawei chips as U.S. escalates AI theft accusations — U.S. gov't alleges IP theft by DeepSeek and other Chinese AI firms

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DeepSeek launches 1.6 trillion parameter V4 on Huawei chips as U.S. escalates AI theft accusations — U.S. gov't alleges IP theft by DeepSeek and other Chinese AI firms U.S. State Department warns embassies worldwide about Chinese model distillation. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful DeepSeek on Friday released a preview of its V4 large language model, the Hangzhou-based startup's most powerful to date, with 1.6 trillion parameters and a 1 million token context window. The model is the first major frontier release optimized for Huawei's Ascend AI processors rather than Nvidia hardware, and it arrived on the same day Reuters reported that the U.S. State Department had sent a diplomatic cable to embassies worldwide instructing staff to warn foreign governments about alleged IP theft by DeepSeek and other Chinese AI firms. V4 comes in two variants: V4-Pro, the flagship, which costs $3.48 per million output tokens, and V4-Flash, a smaller 284 billion parameter version, which costs $0.28. OpenAI currently charges $30 per million output tokens for GPT-5.4, and Anthropic charges $25 for Claude Opus 4.6. DeepSeek, however, acknowledges V4 “falls marginally short” of those closed-source models by roughly three to six months of development, but outperforms every other open-source competitor in agentic coding and reasoning benchmarks. DeepSeek trained its earlier V3 model on 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs, and the company has faced multiple investigations over whether it acquired restricted Nvidia hardware through intermediaries in Singapore. Article continues belowV4 sidesteps that supply chain entirely by training on domestic Ascend chips. Huawei confirmed day-zero compatibility across its full Ascend SuperNode product line, including its latest 950 series processors, and DeepSeek said V4-Pro pricing could fall further once Huawei scales up Ascend 950 production in the second half of this year. The diplomatic cable, per Reuters, instructed embassy staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation” of U.S. models, naming DeepSeek alongside Moonshot AI and MiniMax. Two days earlier, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy published a memo accusing Chinese entities of running "deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns" to distill American frontier AI systems. Those accusations build on claims Anthropic made in February, when the company said DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax had used 24,000 fraudulent accounts to make 16 million exchanges with its Claude model. OpenAI has also accused DeepSeek of distilling its models. China's foreign ministry called the accusations "groundless," according to Reuters, and DeepSeek has previously said its V3 model relied on naturally occurring data collected through web crawling and didn’t intentionally use synthetic data generated by OpenAI. The diplomatic cable and the V4 launch both come just weeks before President Trump is scheduled to visit Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing for a summit expected to cover semiconductor export controls and IP disputes. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory. - jp7189 I hope they'll release an open source/weights version. Things are really heating up in that space. Openai's entry was really good, then gemma4 dropped and blew that away while being far more tunable than gemma3. Glm 4.7 flash is doing quite well though I wish 5 were a bit lighter weight.. but the real star is qwen 3.6 both their moe and dense models are stunning. All of this has happened within the last couple of weeks. Really exciting.Reply After all that noise xai made.. they have been absent from the race. - usertests You could write an article about the hardware requirements alone. Here's one: https://apidog.com/blog/how-to-run-deepseek-v4-locally/Reply You might be able to get away with running V4-Flash on a single H100 80 GB. I think you need workstation levels of RAM (e.g. >256 GB) because of how MOE works. The models are multimodal and can take video input. - hotaru251 every major model is made from IP theft. you can't let some do it w/o issue then have an issue when china does it.Reply - alan.campbell99 Reply Yup. using 'IP theft' and genAI together in these kinds of accusatory statements is always interesting to say the least.hotaru251 said:every major model is made from IP theft. you can't let some do it w/o issue then have an issue when china does it. - zsydeepsky Not really all trained on Huawei chips.Reply There are 2 models: 1.6T v4-pro is probably trained on Nvidia chips 285B v4-flash is probably trained on Huawei chips The guess was that DeepSeek had the big v4-pro earlier, while Huawei hadn't prepared their chips; later, they trained the small v4-flash to test the new platform. Both can do inference on Huawei chips, though, and probably already serve as API on Huawei Ascend clusters. And it's kinda hard to estimate their inference efficiency overall, since the API pricing has been constantly dropping every day since launch...quite unexpected. The latest api pricing is (2026/04/26): input (cache hit) / million tokens: (v4-flash)$0.0028 (v4-pro)$0.003625 input (cache miss) / million tokens: (v4-flash)$0.14 (v4-pro)$0.435 output / million tokens: (v4-flash)$0.28 (v4-pro)$0.87 Usually, DeepSeek sells API quota with a profit margin, thus they are the only lab trained their models with no outside investment money. So if this v4 api price is still profitable for them...then it's nuts for me, like it's already 30-80 times cheaper than GPT/Claude counterparts. and DeepSeek has already open-sourced the weights under the MIT license: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flashhttps://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro along with a comprehensive tech report: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro/blob/main/DeepSeek_V4.pdf So...you can evaluate the "IP-theft" allegations with the context above, and get your own conclusions. - justrudi I logged-in just to say how ridiculous it sounds.Reply You do nothing with IP theft by AI companies and buddy with their CEOs. Someone steals your "stolen-made IP" and you accuse of stealing. Clean your own house first, please. Or get over consequences.