The hidden problem with AI Agents
In our previous article on OpenClaw, we saw that "Agents" (those AIs capable of clicking, searching and working on their own on a computer) are the great revolution of spring 2026. But there is a major problem that the media discuss rather little: the exponential price.
Take an everyday example: if you ask an ultra-secure cutting-edge model like Claude Opus 4.6 to analyse a 10,000-line financial document to find an error in it, the operation (which takes the Agent 5 minutes) can cost you up to 3 or 4 euros in computational "tokens" for thinking. Now imagine a company with 500 employees launching this kind of task with its virtual assistants hundreds of times a day... The end-of-month bill immediately runs into tens of thousands of euros just to rent the American servers!
The DeepSeek V4 solution (A free jackhammer)
Rather than trying to be the smartest in the world and win a poetry contest, the firm DeepSeek approaches the problem from a completely different angle for the release of its V4 (expected around April 2026): breaking the monopoly from below.
Instead of selling access to its AI through a paid subscription like ChatGPT, DeepSeek V4 is designed to be "Open-Weight". This means that the model's architecture and its pre-trained mathematical knowledge are accessible. Any developer or company can download them and install them on their own machine without paying any royalty to DeepSeek!
Better still: its ultra-modern internal architecture (the famous "Mixture-of-Experts" system, which only switches on the tiny parts of the virtual brain needed for a specific question) makes it incredibly light to run. Putting an Agent powered by DeepSeek to work therefore becomes thousands of times cheaper than renting the titanic machines of Anthropic or Google.
Why is this vital for the survival of businesses?
Let's imagine a law firm that wants to launch an army of 50 AI Agents to sort, read and classify hundreds of thousands of legal documents in real time (via the famous RAG method we detailed).
- With a centralised Premium model: The intelligence and formal logic would be perfect, but the cost of thinking for each document read would be ruinous. The operation is not financially profitable for the investment.
- With DeepSeek V4: The firm legally downloads the AI and installs it free of charge on a physical server in its own secure basement. Not only does sensitive client data never leave the building, but the AI works day and night, with no extra cost. In the end, the firm pays only the server's electricity bill!
The perfect tool for "everyday tasks"
Let's be clear: DeepSeek is not trying to beat the absolute secret Claude Mythos at very high-level hacking or quantum research. Its real masterstroke, historically, is being "broadly intelligent enough" to flawlessly carry out 99% of the boring tasks in a company (sorting quotes, extracting data from a PDF, rewording customer emails). All of it with local logistics and at a cost close to absolute zero. This is the real step towards the global democratisation of autonomous Agents.