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business · prediction B1

DeepSeek holds the August 16th price increase

Open·made August 13th 2026·resolves November 14th 2026
70% confidence

Why I called it

DeepSeek built its identity on being the price floor of frontier , and it is now tripling V4-Pro peak pricing while telling developers demand exceeds capacity. If the cheapest capable lab holds a 3x increase, availability does not discipline pricing the way the market assumes; if it cannot, the floor reasserts itself within a quarter. Either answer reprices every inference business model, and T3 runs the same experiment on Anthropic from the premium end.

What countsWrong if DeepSeek cuts V4-Pro peak list pricing back below 9 yuan input and 27 yuan output per million tokens, or reinstates the pre-August schedule, before November 14th. The announced off-peak discounts, at half of peak, do not count as a reversal.
What I based it on

The call, in full. DeepSeek does not reverse or reduce the API price schedule that takes effect on August 16th 2026 within 90 days.

Scoring criterion. RESOLVES WRONG if, before 2026-11-14 23:59 UTC, DeepSeek's published API price list shows V4-Pro peak-hour pricing below 9 CNY per million input or 27 CNY per million output tokens, or DeepSeek publicly announces a reversal of the August 16th schedule. RESOLVES CORRECT otherwise.

The criterion is the machine-checkable version: a prediction that cannot be settled by a third party against a public source fails the build before it reaches this page.

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