Via cnet.com
The Chinese AI startup is assembling a dedicated team to take on Anthropic's Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and OpenAI Codex in the fast-growing agentic AI market.
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that spent most of its existence quietly releasing open-source models, is stepping into the spotlight. The company activated official social media accounts around August 12 and immediately began advertising job openings for a new team dedicated to building AI agents, specifically a coding tool designed to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code.
From research lab to product shop #
The roots of this push trace back to May 20, when Deli Chen, a senior researcher at DeepSeek, announced the formation of something called the “Harness” team. The group’s mandate is to build “Code Harness,” an internally developed code agent that would function as DeepSeek’s answer to the autonomous coding tools currently dominating developer workflows.
The competitive targets are explicit. Claude Code from Anthropic, GitHub Copilot from Microsoft, and OpenAI’s Codex all occupy the space DeepSeek is now entering.
The company, founded in July 2023 with backing from the High-Flyer hedge fund, currently employs somewhere between 160 and 200 people.
A hiring spree with ambition #
DeepSeek’s recruitment activity in 2026 suggests the company isn’t content staying small. In June, the startup posted more than 30 open roles across multiple departments, with the stated goal of doubling the size of every team. Earlier postings throughout the year had already signaled interest in AI search engines and agent infrastructure, but the Harness team represents the clearest product-oriented bet yet.
Doubling a 160-to-200-person company still leaves you well under 500 employees. DeepSeek’s DeepSeek-V3 and R1 models earned attention for delivering competitive performance against models built by teams with far more resources and compute access.
The agentic AI land grab #
Anthropic’s Claude Code has emerged as a particularly strong competitor in this space, offering developers an AI assistant that can navigate codebases, write functions, and debug autonomously. GitHub Copilot, powered by OpenAI’s models, has been embedded into millions of developer workflows through its integration with Visual Studio Code. OpenAI’s own Codex product rounds out the top tier.
There’s a geopolitical dimension worth noting, too. DeepSeek operates under the constraints of US export controls on advanced AI chips, which have limited the compute resources available to Chinese AI companies. The fact that the company has produced competitive models despite those limitations has been one of its most compelling narratives.
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