Rumor Busted: DeepSeek V4 Delayed to Mid-Year? Codebase Says No!

DeepSeekV4.app Exclusive | 2026-02-06 | By: Wing

Just after the "nuclear launch" from OpenAI and Anthropic last night, another piece of news that worries the open-source community began to ferment in financial media circles early this morning:

Conclusion first: This is likely a misinterpretation by lay media.

As the observation station watching the DeepSeek GitHub repository most closely on the web, we found three decisive pieces of evidence proving that the V4 release window is still locked in mid-March (around Chinese New Year).

Evidence 1: GitHub Don't Lie (FlashMLA Branch Activity)

Code commit frequency is the gold standard for judging software release cycles.

Within the last 48 hours, DeepSeek's official FlashMLA repository (the core underlying library for V4, used for Hopper architecture acceleration) has seen intensive commits.

• Actions: Cleaning up TODO comments, optimizing fp8 precision, merging pre-release branch.
• Meaning: This is a typical sign of "Code Freeze". If the release were still half a year away (mid-year), current commits should be "Feature Add", not "Cleanup".

Evidence 2: The "Ghost Placeholder" in API Docs

Our crawler monitored that in some past versions of the DeepSeek official API documentation, the enumeration value deepseek-chat-v4 appeared briefly. Although rolled back quickly, this "appearance" usually happens during the Gray Testing phase before release.

If it were a mid-year release, there would be no need to pre-bury these fields in the production API gateway now.

Evidence 3: Panic Reaction from Silicon Valley

Look at the reactions of OpenAI and Anthropic last night.

• Why did OpenAI skip 5.5 and release GPT-5.3 Codex directly?
• Why was Claude in such a hurry to release Opus 4.6 at 2 AM?

Because the intelligence they received is more accurate than ours. The abnormal "pre-emptive run" of Silicon Valley giants proves that the threat of DeepSeek V4 is imminent. If the opponent still had 5 months to make a move, they could have polished their products more calmly instead of responding hastily.

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🔥 EXCLUSIVE INTEL: CNY "Joint Operation"?

Furthermore, we have received exclusive information that this Chinese New Year will not just be a solo show for DeepSeek.

DeepSeek is planning to join forces with multiple major Chinese AI vendors (including Kimi, Minimax, etc.) for a synchronized "Joint Operation" during the Spring Festival. Unlike the marketing stunts of "Red Packets", this linkage is likely related to Open Source Model Weight Interoperability or a unified Agent Protocol Standard.

If true, this will be a collective counter-attack by the "Open Source Alliance" against the closed-source giants in Silicon Valley.

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🕒 Real Prediction: Chinese New Year is Still Key

Synthesizing all technical intelligence, we maintain our original judgment: The release window for DeepSeek V4 (or V3.5 Turbo) remains highly locked in mid-March 2026 (during the Chinese Lunar New Year).

Those financial media may have confused the timeline of "DeepSeek V5 (AGI Pre-research Version)" with the upcoming "V4 (Engineering Landing Version)".

Don't panic, hold steady. Let the bullets fly for a while.

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🔍 Want to Verify First?

At times like this, listening to the wind and rain is the easiest way to get slapped in the face. We have written monitoring scripts to stare at GitHub and API interfaces 24 hours a day.

👉 Subscribe to the sidebar email list, once the V4 code base becomes Public, or the API interface is connected, we will email you immediately! (10 times faster than Twitter rumors)

(First published on DeepSeekV4.app)