DeepSeek’s Harness artificial intelligence agent framework has reached 1.54 million daily active users in less than three months since its launch, the Chinese AI company announced on Sunday. The rapid growth marks a new competition between major Chinese and American AI companies.
As of November 4, the Hangzhou-based start-up reported that users of Harness through the company’s official application programming interface were consuming approximately 92 trillion tokens a day, which the company stated is equivalent to about 1.1 billion tokens 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. While American giants OpenAI and Anthropic have used their early advantages in developing harnesses to create coding products like Codex and Claude Code, DeepSeek launched Harness on August 13. This was followed by a desktop application on September 29, which allows developers to run agents that can use external software and execute code to perform tasks.
Since the launch, the number of third-party plug-ins has grown to about 35,000, with DeepSeek stating that around 60 per cent of active users have built or installed at least one. Cui Tianyi, a former Jane Street engineer who joined the Harness team in March, stated in a social media post on Sunday that the goal is for DeepSeek’s Harness to act as an operating system for the agent era. Cui compared Harness to a smartphone operating system that includes default tools like a calculator while allowing developers to integrate alternative functions via third-party plug-ins.
Examples of these plug-ins include a community-built tool for reading, highlighting, and translating academic papers, as well as another that shows developers how an agent uses information during a conversation. DeepSeek announced plans to build a marketplace for developers to publish plug-ins and for users to find them, including a support programme that would offer promotional assistance, technical discussions, and token grants.
The company is shifting focus toward monetising its foundation models. According to a report by the Chinese media outlet The Paper, DeepSeek established its first product division last month, with Cui leading the division.
