I reviewed how DeepSeek V4-Pro, Kimi 2.6, Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.7 across the same AI benchmarks. All results are for Max editions, except for Kimi.

Summary: Opus 4.6 forms the baseline all three are trying to beat. DeepSeek V4-Pro roughly matches it across the board, Kimi K2.6 edges it on agentic/coding benchmarks, and Opus 4.7 surpasses it on nearly everything except web search.

DeepSeek V4-Pro Max shines in competitive coding benchmarks. However, it trails both Opus models on software engineering. Kimi K2.6 is remarkably competitive as an open-weight model. Its main weakness is in pure reasoning (GPQA, HMMT) where it trails Opus.

Speculation: The DeepSeek team wanted to come out with a model that surpassed proprietary ones. However, OpenAI dropped 5.4 and 5.5 and Anthropic released Opus 4.6 and 4.7. So they chose to just release V4 and iterate on it.

Basis for speculation? (i) The original reported timeline for the model was February. (ii) Their Hugging Face model card starts with "We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series". (iii) V4 isn't multimodal yet (unlike the others) and their technical report states "We are also working on incorporating multimodal capabilities to our models."