Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnLaurie ChenThu, June 25, 2026 at 11:13 AM GMT+2 4 min read(Corrects paragraph 18 to fix formatting)By Laurie ChenBEIJING, June 25 (Reuters) - Chinese AI startup Z.ai 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."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 AI model has come close to bridging the frontier gap with heavily-funded Western AI labs, after previously surpassing U.S. open-source models such as Google's Gemma and Meta's Llama series despite constraints on computing power.Analysts previously estimated that the performance capabilities of top Chinese AI models were four to six months behind leading U.S. models.Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, said this month it plans a dual listing in the commercial hub Shanghai but did not disclose how much it aimed to raise.SPECIALISING IN CODING, COMPLEX TASKSSpecialising in coding and complex long-horizon tasks, the model has 750 billion total parameters and a massive 1-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.Terms and Privacy PolicyEU DSA contactPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info