Side-by-side comparison of DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek · China) and Step-3.7-Flash (StepFun) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. DeepSeek R1 is rated conditional; Step-3.7-Flash is conditional. They part ways on licence: DeepSeek R1 is "MIT", Step-3.7-Flash is "Apache 2.0".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Frontier reasoning model at o1-class performance. MIT licence makes weights legally clean. Same Chinese-origin alignment/supply-chain considerations as DeepSeek V3. Distilled Qwen/Llama versions inherit their base licence. | Conditional Per the published Apache 2.0 LICENSE, the Step-3.7-Flash weights ship without commercial restriction — a 198B / 11B-active vision-language MoE with a 256k-token context aimed at tool-heavy and agentic workflows. The remaining EU-readiness gaps are the entirely undisclosed training corpus and StepFun's Shanghai-based vendor jurisdiction; deploy on self-managed EU infrastructure and document the Art. 50 transparency story for any synthetic or biometric output. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-05-30 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | MIT | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Yes | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Undisclosed |
| Origin | China | China (Shanghai) |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 27/100 | — |
| Speed | — | — |
| Blended price | $2.36/M | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.