DeepSeek posted numbers for its agent app on X on Sunday. DeepSeek Harness, the open-source counterpart to Claude Code and Codex, reached 1.54 million daily active users as of November 4. The app launched on August 13. Bloomberg picked up the figures and put them on a curve: at the end of September, right after the desktop version shipped, daily users sat at about 271,000.
That is a sixfold jump in five weeks. What gets counted is anyone connecting to DeepSeek’s own servers, so if you run Harness against local weights or another provider, you are not in that number.
Token burn is the real headline figure
Roughly 92 trillion tokens a day across 1.54 million users works out to about 60 million tokens per user per day. For a chat window that would be absurd. For an agent that reads files, runs tests, retries failures and summarizes intermediate results, it is the normal order of magnitude — just publicly quantified for once, which is something providers usually keep to themselves.
I wrote about the proactive super-agent prototype a week ago. Today’s numbers belong to the same line of work: DeepSeek ships the application alongside the model, and ships it openly.
What it means for Anthropic
Bloomberg describes DeepSeek as a challenger to Anthropic and OpenAI with a whole swath of applications built on open-source technology. That lands. Claude Code’s lead rests on the tooling, the permissions and the habit as much as on the model — and an open app nobody has to pay for per seat attacks exactly there.
The numbers still are not comparable. Anthropic publishes no daily user count for Claude Code, and Harness only counts its own servers. What the figure does tell you is something else: an open-source coding agent out of Hangzhou reached a scale in under three months that had no market at all a year ago.