Side-by-side comparison of DeepSeek-V4-Flash (DeepSeek · China) and Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct (Google DeepMind · United States) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. DeepSeek-V4-Flash is rated conditional; Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct is conditional. They part ways on licence: DeepSeek-V4-Flash is "MIT", Gemma 4 26B A4B Instruct is "Apache 2.0".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional DeepSeek-V4-Flash is the smaller-active sibling of V4-Pro under the same MIT terms — permissive on the weights, but the China-based vendor and undocumented training corpus mean any EU deployment still needs a self-hosted topology and a deployer-side GPAI documentation file under AI Act Article 53. | Conditional Based on published licence terms, Gemma 4 26B A4B ships under pure Apache 2.0 with no prohibited-use carve-outs — a departure from prior Gemma generations. The sparse-MoE architecture (25.2B total / 3.8B active) puts it in an ambiguous zone for EU AI Act GPAI systemic-risk classification, and US origin plus image-input support add transparency obligations that deployers should document. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-28 | 2026-04-17 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | MIT | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Unrestricted | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Categories only | Domain-level summary |
| Origin | China | United States |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 47/100 | 27/100 |
| Speed | 79 tok/s | — |
| Blended price | $0.17/M | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.