An investment platform called Autopilot has reported that a portfolio built on DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence API returned 69.67 per cent from September last year, outperforming both the S&P 500 and its own rival AI-driven funds across the same period.

Autopilot, which runs automated investing strategies, applied the same company-grading system used by its existing GPT Portfolio but routed the calculations through DeepSeek’s API instead. The portfolio rebalances monthly. According to a post shared on Instagram, the S&P 500 returned 18.98 per cent over the equivalent stretch, while the GPT Portfolio, running identical grading logic, returned 44.8 per cent. Autopilot describes the DeepSeek Portfolio as the strongest-performing strategy across its entire platform.

The company notes that thousands of users are already following the portfolio automatically, a figure that points to meaningful retail appetite for AI-driven stock selection at a moment when DeepSeek has attracted considerable attention across the technology and investment community.

The comparison is a straightforward one: same grading system, same monthly rebalancing schedule, different AI engine doing the calculations. Swapping GPT for DeepSeek, by Autopilot’s own account, produced a return roughly four times that of the broader market index and well ahead of its closest internal benchmark.

Autopilot Holdings Corp and Autopilot Advisers LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser, carry the standard disclosure that past performance is not indicative of future results and that investing involves the risk of loss of principal. The figures cited relate to performance from September last year.

Whether the outperformance holds as market conditions shift is, of course, the question that always follows a result like this. A single strong run does not settle the debate over which AI model picks stocks best. What it does do is give DeepSeek’s proponents a concrete data point to point to and give Autopilot a headline number at a moment when AI-powered investing strategies are attracting growing scrutiny and growing interest in equal measure.