Side-by-side comparison of DeepSeek-V4-Flash (DeepSeek · China) and Qwen 2.5 (Alibaba · China) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. DeepSeek-V4-Flash is rated conditional; Qwen 2.5 is conditional. They part ways on licence: DeepSeek-V4-Flash is "MIT", Qwen 2.5 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 Legally clean under Apache 2.0, but Chinese origin raises supply-chain and geopolitical questions. Vet carefully for sensitive use cases. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-28 | 2026-04-15 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | MIT | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Unrestricted | Yes |
| Training data | Categories only | Undisclosed |
| Origin | China | China |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 47/100 | 16/100 |
| Speed | 79 tok/s | 55 tok/s |
| Blended price | $0.17/M | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.