Allocators: the split is not East against West. It is margin owners against token sellers. The same week priced DeepSeek like a frontier lab and marked MiniMax below its HK$165 IPO price (BigGo Finance). Underwrite who keeps the spread when the token price falls another ten times.

Builders: a decision call is now a commodity line item: $0.10 per million input tokens in the West (OpenAI) and 0.9 yuan in the East (BigGo Finance). If your product charges for routing, scoring or labeling, the price umbrella just closed. Move up the stack to the workflow and the data.

Both: in the East, demand for agents is written into a state plan to 2030 (BigGo Finance). In the West it arrives company by company, as Uber puts an agent in front of 30,000 staff (TechCrunch). Cheap decisions are not the scarce side of this market.

DeepSeek has reportedly raised about RMB 100 billion (about $15 billion), one of the biggest funding rounds in China (TechCrunch). Reuters reports more than 15 backers, including GigaDevice, Meituan and Geely, at a pre-money valuation of RMB 500 billion, double the original RMB 50 billion target (Reuters via Express Tribune). Bloomberg lists CATL and Tencent among potential backers (TechCrunch). The reports landed two days after Washington ordered DeepSeek technology out of US federal civilian systems. (Reuters and Bloomberg, 22 Oct — reported)

MiniMax closed at HK$160.7 on Thursday, down 6.52% on the day and below its HK$165 IPO price for the first time since listing in January. Its market value is back to about HK$56.6 billion (about $7.2 billion) (BigGo Finance). (BigGo Finance, 22 Oct — reported)

iFlytek launched Spark X2.6, a 293B MoE model with 30B active parameters and context up to 1M tokens. Launch input pricing is 0.9 yuan per million tokens at a limited-time discount, and the 4B on-device version, Spark X2.6-4B, is open source (BigGo Finance). Chairman Liu Qingfeng says Spark is the only model trained entirely on Chinese-made compute (IT Home). (IT Home, 22 Oct — company claim)

Ant Digital Technologies released LingDT-Decision-1.0, a decision model in 4B and 27B sizes, built to choose among fixed options instead of generating text. Ant says business tests in customer service, risk control and finance cut token use by over 90% (PANews). (PANews, 22 Oct — company claim)

MIIT and seven other agencies issued the 15th Five-Year plan for industrial foundation capabilities (MIIT). It calls for industry-specific models alongside general models, and names model-as-a-service and agent-as-a-service as business models to build through 2030 (BigGo Finance). (MIIT, 22 Oct — official)

OpenAI made its Decisions API generally available on Thursday. The price is $0.10 per million input tokens, $0.01 for cached input, and nothing for output (OpenAI Developer Community). It runs on GPT-6 Luna, answers up to 400 questions per request, and OpenAI says it responds up to 10 times faster than the same model on the Responses API (OpenAI). (OpenAI, 22 Oct — company disclosure)

Uber is putting ChatGPT Work in front of its entire workforce of about 30,000 people, up from a pilot of 1,000. About 80% of the pilot users were not engineers (TechCrunch). (Uber and OpenAI, 22 Oct, via TechCrunch — company disclosure)

Perplexity sells the same kind of decision for less, and gives the weights away. Its pplx-decider v1.1 is open source under Apache 2.0, its hosted price is $0.02 per million input tokens, and its model card scores it ahead of TypeSafe's Jev (explainx.ai; DEV Community). (Perplexity, Oct — company claims)

Microsoft joined the price war with Microsoft-Decision-1 at $0.042 per million input tokens and free output. Seven decision-model launches landed in about five weeks, and the spread from cheapest to most expensive is now 5 times for APIs that do structurally the same job (DEV Community). (Launch coverage, Oct — reported)

Anthropic previewed Claude Duet, a personal agent for small businesses and professionals that sends daily briefs, watches connected apps and handles tasks such as scheduling meetings and building dashboards. It opened a waitlist for Pro and Max subscribers, and Anthropic warns Duet "might misread a thread or miscalibrate what's urgent" (CNBC). (Anthropic, 21 Oct, via CNBC — company disclosure)

DeepSeek: reportedly raised about $15 billion (RMB 100 billion) at a reported RMB 500 billion pre-money valuation (Reuters via Express Tribune). (Reported)

No other new funding rounds were disclosed in today's news flow.