Tech & AI
DeepSeek Says Its Harness Agent Platform Has Passed 1.5 Million Daily Users
The Hangzhou lab's first usage disclosure shows rapid growth since September, though the figures are its own and unaudited.
HedgeWeekly Tech & AI Desk ·
DeepSeek has published user numbers for Harness, its open-source platform for AI agents, for the first time. Harness, which lets an AI model plan and carry out multi-step tasks such as coding, had 1.54 million daily active users on the company's official API as of 4 November, according to Yicai Global. A week-ended average was 271,000 at the end of September.
DeepSeek said users consume about 92 trillion tokens a day, tokens being the small chunks of text that AI models read and write. About 35,000 third-party plugins have been built since launch, and roughly 60% of users have made or installed at least one. A separate analysis notes the 1.54 million is a single-day figure, not directly comparable with seven-day averages, and that monthly users were about 5.48 million. None of the numbers has been independently verified.
The figures cover only people using DeepSeek's own API, so they exclude those who run the open-source code with other models. The company is preparing support for plugin authors and plans an official plugin marketplace, with no date, fees or revenue share given. The release of the data follows a 31 October technical post describing 'super-agent' designs that keep context across sessions and run several tasks at once.
Why it matters: agent tools are where US and Chinese labs now compete for developer spend, and heavy token use drives demand for chips and cloud capacity. Investors should watch whether DeepSeek monetises the marketplace, how US rivals respond on pricing, and whether Chinese demand for domestic or restricted Nvidia hardware rises as usage grows.