Robert Hart is a London-based reporter at The Verge covering all things AI and a Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for Forbes . Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a preview of its hotly anticipated next-generation AI model V4 on Friday, saying that the open-source model can compete with leading closed-source systems from US rivals including Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. DeepSeek says V4 marks a major improvement over prior models, especially in coding, a capability that has become central to AI agents and helped drive the success of tools like ChatGPT Codex and Claude Code . The release is also a milestone for China’s chip industry, with DeepSeek explicitly highlighting compatibility with domestic Huawei technology. The release comes a year after DeepSeek rattled the US AI industry with R1, a model it claimed was trained at a fraction of the cost of leading US systems. DeepSeek has not disclosed V4’s training costs or what hardware it was trained on.…