DeepSeek releases V4.1-Flash-1017 and opens its Search & Fetch APIs
DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, an updated V4.1 Flash with what it calls stronger benchmarks, faster task completion and shorter outputs, live in its app and API with open weights, and opened Search and Fetch APIs to everyone at $0.75 per 1,000 calls.
What happened
- On October 17, 2026, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 on its website, app and API.
- DeepSeek describes it as stronger on benchmarks, faster at completing tasks and shorter in its outputs than the previous version. These are DeepSeek's own claims.
- Weights are on Hugging Face and ModelScope; the Hugging Face model card lists the MIT license.
- DeepSeek's Search and Fetch APIs are now open to everyone at $0.75 per 1,000 calls per endpoint. Calls through server-side tools in DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex are free for DeepSeek API users until October 31, 2026 at 16:00 UTC.
Why it matters: If you run coding or research agents on a budget, this is a low-cost open-weight model plus a web search API to test, and the agent-harness search calls are free until October 31.
Sources
- DeepSeek API news: V4.1-Flash-1017 release api-docs.deepseek.com
- Hugging Face: DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 huggingface.co
Checked October 18, 2026 against the sources above. Claims about performance or benchmarks are the company's own unless stated otherwise.