DeepSeek’s updated V4 Pro AI model struggles on benchmarks, shines in cybersecurity

August 13, 2026 1 min read

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek has quietly released DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813, an updated version of its latest flagship model, leaving some developers underwhelmed by its overall capabilities and disappointed in its pricing – but impressing researchers in niche areas like cybersecurity.

The stealth update to April’s preview version came with a brief statement on DeepSeek’s official website on Wednesday, noting that the model offered “significantly enhanced agent capabilities”, but the statement was removed as of Thursday afternoon. The release follows the company’s smaller V4 Flash model, which jolted Silicon Valley last month due to its extreme cost efficiency.

However, early benchmark results suggest the new flagship is struggling to match its top-tier rivals.

DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 scored 53 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, on par with Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2 released in June, but was four points behind the mid-tier Terra model in OpenAI’s latest GPT-5.6 series and seven points behind Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3.

On the Vals Index, compiled by San Francisco-based Vals AI to evaluate models across several benchmarks, the new DeepSeek model ranked 12th. It trailed OpenAI’s previous-generation GPT-5.5 and also lagged well behind frontier systems like Kimi K3 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.

The model struggled in two areas in particular: completing tasks within a sandboxed terminal environment and generating complex financial models in Excel spreadsheets, Vals AI said on Wednesday.

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