DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3.2 Exp
DeepSeek V3.2 Exp shows solid coding performance at a very competitive price point, with tool use and function calling support — a decent experimental option for technical tasks, though availability for Western businesses may be a practical consideration.
Assessment date: March 12, 2026
Our methodology takes into account a range of factors including pricing, functionality, capabilities, benchmark performance, and real-world applicability. Rankings are reviewed and updated regularly as new models are released. Issues with our rankings? Contact us
DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp is an experimental large language model released by DeepSeek as an intermediate step between V3.1 and future architectures. It introduces DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA), a fine-grained sparse attention mechanism designed to improve training and inference efficiency in long-context scenarios while maintaining output quality. Users can control the reasoning behaviour with the reasoning enabled boolean. Learn more in our docs The model was trained under conditions aligned with V3.1-Terminus to enable direct comparison. Benchmarking shows performance roughly on par with V3.1 across reasoning, coding, and agentic tool-use tasks, with minor tradeoffs and gains depending on the domain. This release focuses on validating architectural optimizations for extended context lengths rather than advancing raw task accuracy, making it primarily a research-oriented model for exploring efficient transformer designs.
Capabilities
Architecture
| Modality | Text → Text |
| Tokenizer | DeepSeek |
| Instruct Type | deepseek-v3.1 |
Performance Indices
Source: Artificial Analysis
Benchmark Scores
Evaluations
Benchmark data from Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face
Model Information
Pricing
| Token Type | Cost per 1M tokens | Cost per 1K tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.27 | $0.000270 |
| Output | $0.41 | $0.000410 |
Live Performance
Live endpoint metrics — refreshed every 30 minutes.
External Resources
Data sourced from OpenRouter API, Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard. Scores are editorially curated by our team.
Last updated: March 13, 2026 7:52 pm