DeepSeek released an update of its AI model this weekend that it says is faster and leaner, ramping up the Chinese company's challenge to Silicon Valley rivals.

• DeepSeek released an update of its AI model this weekend that it says is faster and leaner, intensifying its competition with Anthropic, OpenAI, and domestic rivals like Moonshot Kimi and Z.ai.
• In internal benchmarks, the update beats larger rivals like Claude Opus 5 and GPT 5.6-Sol on coding and agent tasks, and DeepSeek is opening its in-house search engine to developers through new Search and Fetch APIs.
• Trained with reinforcement learning using self-feedback, the model runs faster, produces shorter outputs, and performs well in end-to-end software development and agent tasks, the company says.