DeepSeek Harness agent platform hits 1.54M daily users, about 35,000 plugins

Bloomberg reports that DeepSeek Harness has grown more than fivefold since late September, reaching 1.54 million daily users within three months of launch. A standalone desktop client that connects directly to DeepSeek inference endpoints accelerated the surge. The platform now handles about 92 trillion tokens per day and hosts roughly 35,000 third-party plugins.

Harness is open-source agent infrastructure: developers write plugins that extend the agent's tools, and users mix them freely. DeepSeek plans to formalize this ecosystem with an official plugin marketplace, backed by developer token grants and technical onboarding. That mirrors the app-store economics Western labs are pursuing with agent registries and connectors. Separately, a DeepSeek open-weight model placed second on Vals AI's CyberOffense leaderboard at about $3 per run, close to OpenAI's specialized cyber model at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek also plans to train V5 on Huawei Ascend chips.

The competitive significance is that an open, cheap Chinese agent stack is gaining scale at the same time that Western coding agents face trust scrutiny, from Goldman Sachs pulling Claude Code from staff to reports of agents leaking secrets.

Caveats: heavy users report infinite loops, context overflow and up to 20x token bloat when too many plugins are loaded. A popular r/DeepSeek thread titled 'Harness Users – Beware' warns about these issues. DAU figures are company-reported.