Z.ai’s flagship GLM-5.2 model, released a day after Anthropic disabled worldwide access to its most advanced models, stunned global users after its performance benchmarks narrowly trailed leading closed-source models.
“Our mission is to obtain AGI, so right now our focus is how to improve our model to achieve the upper bound of intelligence. So all these resources are helping us,” said Zheng Qinkai, technical lead of the firm’s CodeGeeX team.
The accompanying surge in investor interest sent shares rallying more than 2,000 percent from its blockbuster Hong Kong debut in January, to cross a threshold of HK$1 trillion in market capitalisation this week.
“This model is comparable to the top closed models,” Zheng said at its head office in Beijing. “It’s the first time that an open-source model really delivers very solid coding and agent performance that can compare with the leading proprietary AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.”
GLM-5.2 now holds fourth place on Artificial Analysis’ LLM intelligence leaderboard and the second spot on Code Arena’s front-end coding leaderboard, operating at roughly a sixth of the cost of closed US frontier models.
The sudden “unplugging” of closed US frontier models has unleashed severe anxiety among global allies such as Canada and France, whose leaders heavily criticised over-reliance on US-controlled AI infrastructure at a G7 summit last week.
For the first time a Chinese open-source AI model has come close to bridging the frontier gap with heavily-funded Western AI labs, after previously surpassing US open-source models such as Google’s Gemma and Meta’s Llama series despite constraints on computing power.
Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, said this month it plans a dual listing in Shanghai but did not disclose how much it aimed to raise.
Specialising in coding and complex long-horizon tasks, the model has 750 billion total parameters and a massive one-million token context window.
It was released with inference adaptation to a wide variety of domestic chip infrastructure users, including Huawei Ascend clusters, the company said in a blog post.
Since February, Z.ai’s GLM-5 series has been adapted to run on domestic semiconductors after the United States tightened China’s access to advanced Nvidia chips.
Despite fierce domestic price competition, Z.ai has successfully hiked prices for its frontier models multiple times this year, reflecting its strong enterprise adoption in China, where it is also widely used in public sector procurement.
In a post on X, co-founder Tang Jie emphasised Z.ai’s commitment to open-source and described the abrupt pulling of Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models as “deeply regrettable”.
Its next GLM-5.5 model is expected to be released in August and could become the next key milestone in Chinese frontier AI. (Reuters)
