Can DeepSeek challenge OpenAI, Anthropic in AI agents as Harness adoption takes off?

DeepSeek’s Harness artificial intelligence agent framework has reached 1.54 million daily active users less than three months after launch, the Chinese AI champion said on Sunday, marking rapid growth in a new battleground between leading Chinese and American AI giants.

Users of Harness through the company’s official application programming interface were consuming around 92 trillion tokens a day as of November 4, the Hangzhou-based start-up said. That is equivalent to about 1.1 billion tokens consumed per second.

A “harness” is the software infrastructure that turns a large language model into an AI agent that can autonomously execute tasks on behalf of users, rather than simply respond to prompts.

US giants OpenAI and Anthropic have both leveraged their early advantage in developing harnesses to build their industry-leading coding products, Codex and Claude Code, respectively.

DeepSeek’s Harness went live on August 13, followed by a desktop app on September 29, allowing developers to run AI agents that can execute code and use external software to carry out tasks.

The company said the number of third-party plug-ins had grown to about 35,000 since launch, with around 60 per cent of active users having built or installed at least one.

“Our goal is for DeepSeek’s Harness to act as an operating system for the agent era,” said Cui Tianyi, a former Jane Street engineer who joined the Harness team in March, in a social media post on Sunday.

Cui likened Harness to a smartphone operating system that came with tools such as an alarm clock and calculator, while allowing developers to integrate alternative functions through third-party plug-ins, much as smartphone users download alternatives to default apps.

One community-built plug-in combines tools for reading, highlighting and translating academic papers, while allowing users to ask an AI agent questions about the material. Another shows developers what information an agent is using and how that changes throughout a conversation.

DeepSeek said it would build a marketplace where developers could publish plug-ins and users could find them. The planned support programme would offer token grants, technical discussions and promotional assistance for developers.

The company is increasingly turning its attention to monetising its powerful foundation models. It set up its first product division last month, led by Cui, Chinese media outlet The Paper reported.