DeepSeek has officially released the deepseek-v4-flash API into public beta as of July 31, 2026. The update retains the same model string, endpoint, and architecture, but introduces a refined post-training pass that significantly boosts agent performance metrics, surpassing the V4-Pro-Preview on nine agent benchmarks.
The most notable change is the model's enhanced agent capabilities. According to DeepSeek's reported figures, the official V4-Flash substantially exceeds V4-Pro-Preview across all nine evaluated benchmarks, including Terminal Bench 2.1 (82.7), NL2Repo (54.2), and Cybergym (76.7). These scores were measured using DeepSeek Harness minimal mode at max tier with top_p=0.95 and temperature=1.0, and should be treated as vendor-reported until independently verified.
DeepSeek emphasizes that V4-Flash-0731 shares the exact structure and size of its preview version; only the post-training was redone. This means latency and cost profiles remain stable, but prompts may behave differently due to changes in tool-calling style and refusal behavior. Self-hosters are unaffected as this is an API-side upgrade.
The official Flash model natively supports the Responses API format and is specifically adapted for Codex, allowing developers to integrate it without translation shims. This positions Flash as the default model for coding agents, not just a budget fallback.
No pricing changes accompanied the release. V4-Flash remains at $0.14 per 1M input tokens (cache miss), $0.0028 (cache hit), and $0.28 per 1M output tokens. A peak-hour surcharge has been announced but is not yet active. Only the Flash API was upgraded; V4-Pro and app models remain unchanged, with an official V4-Pro release promised soon.