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DeepSeek V4 vs Claude Opus 4.6

Comprehensive comparison between DeepSeek's DeepSeek V4 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6. Compare pricing, performance, features, and user reviews.

deepseek v4 vs claudeopen source vs closed ai 2026deepseek vs anthropic

DeepSeek V4

DeepSeek

DeepSeek V4 (released 2026-04-24) ships two MIT-licensed MoE variants: V4-Pro (1.6T/49B active) and V4-Flash (284B/13B active), both with 1M-token context and hybrid Compressed Sparse Attention + Heavily Compressed Attention. Three reasoning modes (Non-think / Think High / Think Max). V4-Pro uses only 27% of V3.2's FLOPs and 10% of its KV cache at 1M context. Priced well below GPT-5.5 / Opus 4.7 while matching them on most benchmarks.

$1.74/$3.48per M tokens
Details

Claude Opus 4.6

Anthropic

Anthropic's flagship model with 1M token context (now default), adaptive thinking, and the highest agentic coding scores. Introduced Agent Teams for parallel autonomous coding. Nearly doubled ARC-AGI-2 score over Opus 4.5 (68.8% vs 37.6%).

$5/$25per M tokens
Details

Specs Comparison

SpecificationDeepSeek V4Claude Opus 4.6
Context Window1000K1000K
Max Output66K128K
Input (per 1M tokens)$1.74$5.00
Output (per 1M tokens)$3.48$25.00
Reasoning
Open Source

Scenario Score Comparison

Coding
—
vs
96
Writing
—
vs
91

DeepSeek V4

Pros

  • + 1M token context window with aggressive KV-cache compression
  • + MIT license — fully open-source, self-hostable
  • + V4-Pro $1.74/$3.48 per MTok — far cheaper than GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7
  • + New SOTA for open models on SimpleQA-Verified (57.9)
  • + OpenAI + Anthropic API-compatible endpoints
  • + Three reasoning modes tunable per request

Cons

  • − Still trails GPT-5.4 / Gemini 3.1 Pro by 3-6 months on frontier benchmarks
  • − Servers in China (overseas latency, geopolitical concerns)
  • − Text-only — V3's multimodal (image/video) capability not confirmed for V4
  • − V4-Pro self-hosting needs substantial hardware (49B active × FP4/FP8)

Claude Opus 4.6

Pros

  • + Highest SWE-bench score (80.8%)
  • + 128K max output (doubled from 4.5)
  • + Adaptive thinking with effort levels
  • + Agent Teams for parallel coding
  • + Best instruction following in complex contexts

Cons

  • − 2x price of GPT-5.4
  • − Response prefilling removed (breaking change)
  • − Extended thinking deprecated
  • − Rate limits can be hit quickly on entry-level plans

Recommendation

Choose DeepSeek V4 if you:

  • • Need 1m token context window with aggressive kv-cache compression
  • • Need mit license — fully open-source, self-hostable
  • • Need v4-pro $1.74/$3.48 per mtok — far cheaper than gpt-5.5 and opus 4.7

Choose Claude Opus 4.6 if you:

  • • Need highest swe-bench score (80.8%)
  • • Need 128k max output (doubled from 4.5)
  • • Need adaptive thinking with effort levels

Based on scores across 2 scenarios, Claude Opus 4.6 performs better overall.

DeepSeek V4 Details Claude Opus 4.6 Details

Get Started with DeepSeek V4

1Visit the provider's website
2Create an account
3Start using the model

Get Started with Claude Opus 4.6

1Sign up at claude.ai
2Choose Pro ($20/mo) for Opus access
3Start chatting or try Claude Code

💡 Free tier uses Sonnet. Upgrade to Pro for Opus.

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