Organisation · lab · CN

Zhipu AI

The open-weight GLM family of models, spun out of Tsinghua University; now listed as Z.ai.

10 entries · March 2023 – July 2026

Zhipu AI is a Chinese lab that grew out of Tsinghua University's Knowledge Engineering Group and builds the GLM family of models. It was an early mover in open Chinese models, releasing the bilingual ChatGLM-6B in 2023 — small enough to run on a single consumer graphics card — well before the larger open releases from Alibaba and DeepSeek that followed. Now trading publicly as Z.ai after a Hong Kong listing in early 2026, it releases frontier-scale models under permissive licences. Its 2026 GLM-5, reported to have been trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips rather than Nvidia hardware, drew particular attention as a marker of China's effort to build an AI compute stack independent of US export controls; the company has been on the US Commerce Department's Entity List since January 2025.

Category
Chinese AI labs
Founded
2019
HQ
Beijing, CN
Key people
Zhang Peng

Appears alongside

Featured in threads

Tracks

  • Open weights & ecosystem 7
  • Models & capabilities 6
  • Benchmarks & progress 3
  • Security & misuse 2
  • Government & policy 1
  • Compute & infrastructure 1

  1. UK AISI and US CAISI jointly assess Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 for cyber capability

    Kimi K3 failed to produce a working exploit on any of 41 code-execution tasks, versus 20 of 41 for the leading closed US models tested with safeguards disabled.

    Security & misuse

  2. UK AISI reports narrowing cyber-capability gap between open-weight and closed frontier models

    On a 70-task cyber suite, GLM-5.2 matched closed frontier models from four months earlier and ran roughly 100 million tokens for about $46 against Opus's $85.

    Security & misuse · Open weights & ecosystem

  3. US CAISI publishes assessment of Z.ai's GLM-5.2

    The US assessment found GLM-5.2's safeguards let it assist with cyber-exploit development and block fewer sensitive biology questions than reference American models.

    Benchmarks & progress · Open weights & ecosystem

  4. WSJ reports China has 'matched' Anthropic in cybersecurity; Zvi and others dispute the framing

    Critics said the report conflated finding vulnerabilities when pointed at them, which GLM-5.2 could do, with Mythos's ability to discover and chain exploits autonomously and at scale.

    Benchmarks & progress · Government & policy

  5. GLM-5.2 becomes the leading open-weight model

    It ranked #25 overall on LMArena, #8 on EQ-Bench and second on Vending-Bench 2, but commentators noted it cost more per task than smarter closed rivals.

    Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities

  6. Zhipu AI releases GLM-5.2, tops open-weight rankings

    The MIT-licensed, 744-billion-parameter model scored 51 on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index, the highest of any open-weight model, days after Washington forced Anthropic offline for foreign users.

    Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities

  7. Zhipu (Z.ai) releases GLM-5, trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips

    Released under the MIT licence, the 744-billion-parameter model scored 77.8% on SWE-bench Verified, days ahead of new Alibaba and ByteDance model launches.

    Models & capabilities · Open weights & ecosystem · Compute & infrastructure

  8. Zhipu (Z.ai) releases GLM-4.5 series

    355B-parameter open-weight model family aimed at agentic use, part of China's open-source push after DeepSeek-R1.

    Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress

  9. Zhipu launches GLM-4, claiming near-GPT-4 parity

    Unveiled at Zhipu's first DevDay with a 128K-token context window, alongside a $100 million fund the company pledged to LLM startups.

    Models & capabilities

  10. Zhipu open-sources ChatGLM-6B

    The 6.2-billion-parameter model, trained on roughly a trillion tokens of Chinese and English text, could run on a single consumer graphics card with 6GB of memory using INT4 quantisation.

    Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities

Also mentioned in 7 entries

Referenced in passing — Zhipu AI isn't the main subject of these.