After Anthropic shutdown, China’s Z.ai closes frontier gap as it plans dual listing
After Anthropic shutdown, China’s Z.ai closes frontier gap as it plans dual listing
Publish Date: 2026-06-25 06:37:00
Source Domain: www.reuters.com
- Z.ai’s stock surges over 20-fold in six months
- Investors bullish on Chinese AI
- Latest open-source model closes gap with leading U.S. models
- Founder highlights open-source advantages vs. Anthropic shutdown
BEIJING, June 25 (Reuters) – Chinese AI startup Z.ai (2513.HK) said on Thursday it plans to use domestic listing proceeds to fund a quest for artificial general intelligence, after its latest model scored close to leading U.S. models from Anthropic and OpenAI on public benchmarks.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.
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“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 Qinkai Zheng, technical lead of the firm’s CodeGeeX team.
The accompanying surge in investor interest sent shares rallying more than 2,000% from their blockbuster Hong Kong debut in January, to cross a threshold of HK$1 trillion ($128 billion) in market capitalisation this week.
“This model is comparable to the top closed models,” Zheng told reporters 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 U.S. frontier models.
The sudden “unplugging” of closed U.S. frontier models has unleashed severe anxiety among global allies such as Canada and France, whose leaders heavily criticised over-reliance on U.S.-controlled AI infrastructure at a G7 summit last week.
For the first time a Chinese open-source…
