China

DeepSeek released V4-Flash-0731 into public beta on July 31, 2026, a re-post-trained version of V4-Flash-Preview that outscored V4-Pro-Preview on all nine benchmarks in DeepSeek's self-reported model card, including a 41.6-point gap on DeepSWE. Independent measurement by Artificial Analysis placed the model's Terminal-Bench 2.1 score at 79%, below DeepSeek's reported 82.7%, and found Anthropic's Opus 4.8 ranked higher on every benchmark row in DeepSeek's own comparison table. The model is priced at $0.14 per million cache-miss input tokens, roughly one-third the cost of V4-Pro, with a 1,048,576-token context window and 13 billion active parameters out of 284 billion total.

China's central bank confirmed three overnight reverse-repo sessions totaling 1.8 trillion yuan between July 29 and 31, with a final 300 billion yuan session scheduled for August 3 to close out the month-end liquidity program. The PBOC does not publish overnight rates in its official notices, meaning the reported 1.25% rate relies solely on Reuters sourcing rather than primary confirmation. Deputy Governor Zou Lan has clarified that overnight operations target short-term liquidity smoothing, not rate-setting, with the seven-day reverse-repo rate remaining the main policy instrument.

BYD sold 419,211 new-energy vehicles at wholesale in July 2026, its highest monthly total of the year, with record overseas shipments of 179,841 units accounting for roughly 43% of sales. Despite the monthly high, cumulative January through July sales of 2,227,722 units leave BYD needing approximately 554,456 sales per month for the rest of the year just to reach the lower bound of its 5.0 million unit annual target. No formal guidance revision has been reported, and the BEV and PHEV breakdown for July remains unavailable.