Symbolic imageDeepSeek raises prices with V4 Pro as Alibaba restricts Qwen
DeepSeek launched V4 Pro on Thursday and raised its AI service prices several times over. Alibaba attached commercial conditions to its downloadable flagship Qwen3.8-Max.
China's state outlet Global Times reported on Thursday, 13 August, in a brief notice that DeepSeek had launched V4 Pro and put it on a par with Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. Bloomberg reported the same day that DeepSeek had raised prices for its AI services by multiple times. Low prices at close to Western quality have so far been the main draw of Chinese labs abroad.
Qwen free to download, licensed to sell
Alibaba keeps the core files of its 2.4-trillion-parameter Qwen3.8-Max free to download but now requires a paid licence from firms whose 'model as a service' or 'AI work assistant' business exceeds 50 million US dollars in revenue over any 12 months, the South China Morning Post reported. Internal use is exempt unless outputs reach third parties.
Russia's clouds shift to Chinese models
Chinese models have taken a large share of Russia's corporate clouds, Kommersant reported via Meduza: on Yandex AI Studio, Qwen processed 21.2 per cent of tokens in the first half and DeepSeek 13.5 per cent, against 54 per cent for Yandex's own models. Users cite lower prices at comparable quality, and sanctions that block payments to most Western providers.
Other opinions
Global Times casts the launch as parity with a US frontier model; Bloomberg frames the week around mounting AI costs at Alibaba, Baidu and Kuaishou.