DeepSeek said its open-source Harness AI agent framework has reached 1.54 million daily active users less than three months after its launch, as the Hangzhou-based start-up challenges established offerings such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.

The figures for the Harness framework, which launched in August, underscore the rising use of agentic tools enabling foundation models to complete complex tasks with minimal human oversight.

Cui Tianyi, a former Jane Street engineer who joined the Harness team in March, said in a social media post that Harness is intended to “act as an operating system for the agent era”.

Open-source challenger

Users of Harness through DeepSeek’s official API consumed about 92 trillion tokens per day as of 4 November, or about 1.1 billion tokens per second, the company said in a social media post on Sunday.

The number of third-party plug-ins has reached about 35,000, with around 60 percent of active users having installed at least one.

Plug-in marketplace

Following the launch of Harness on 13 August, DeepSeek introduced a desktop app on 29 September that allows developers to run AI agents that can execute code and make use of external software.

DeepSeek said it plans to build a marketplace where developers can publish plug-ins for users to find, and said it would offer a support programme with token grants, technical discussions and promotional assistance for developers.