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

DeepSeek's artificial intelligence agent framework, Harness, has gained significant traction since its launch on August 13, amassing 1.54 million daily active users in less than three months. This rapid growth has positioned DeepSeek as a formidable contender in the ongoing race between leading Chinese and American AI giants, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Harness users are currently consuming approximately 92 trillion tokens per day, an impressive figure equivalent to around 1.1 billion tokens per second as of November 4. Harness, essentially a software infrastructure that transforms large language models into autonomous AI agents, differentiates itself from traditional language models by enabling them to execute tasks independently.

OpenAI and Anthropic have capitalized on their early lead in harness development to create their industry-leading coding products, Codex and Claude Code, respectively. DeepSeek's Harness was made accessible through an official application programming interface in August, followed by a desktop app on September 29. This release facilitated developers to run AI agents capable of executing code and utilizing external software to carry out various tasks.

Since its launch, the number of third-party plug-ins for Harness has grown to about 35,000, with approximately 60% of active users having built or installed at least one. DeepSeek's Cui Tianyi, a former engineer from Jane Street, envisions Harness as an "operating system for the agent era," akin to a smartphone operating system equipped with default tools like an alarm clock and calculator, while enabling developers to integrate alternative functions via third-party plug-ins.

Community-built plug-ins, such as one for reading, highlighting, and translating academic papers, as well as another displaying the information an agent uses throughout a conversation, demonstrate Harness's versatility. The company plans to establish a marketplace where developers can publish plug-ins and users can discover them, backed by a support program offering token grants, technical discussions, and promotional assistance.

DeepSeek is increasingly focusing on monetizing its powerful foundation models, recently setting up its first product division led by Cui.