How DeepSeek’s radical architecture is shattering Silicon Valley's token moat

DeepSeek’s announcement over the weekend that it has made its 75% price cut permanent on its flagship V4 Pro model is a disruptive assault on the capital-heavy business models of Silicon Valley’s frontier labs. The reduction on DeepSeek V4 Pro directly undercuts comparable Western models used as workhorses for enterprise production. It is 7x cheaper on inputs and 17x cheaper on outputs than Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT 5.5-Med, while the lightweight DeepSeek V4 Flash undercuts entry-tier alternatives like Claude Haiku by 10x to 25x. The price cuts are enabled by a series of hardware-software innovations, especially around cache, that make DeepSeek's models radically more efficient to run. When hosted natively in China, DeepSeek’s cache-read pricing is a whopping 87x cheaper th