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.
