A cheap Chinese AI model is closing in on Anthropic and OpenAI

Chinese startup’s latest AI model has landed fourth on one of the industry’s most closely watched intelligence rankings, and it costs a fraction of what Anthropic or OpenAI charge for comparable performance. GLM-5.2, released last month by Beijing-based Z.ai, has become the talk of Silicon Valley for coding and agentic capabilities that edge close to the leading American systems, prompting comparisons to DeepSeek’s market-rattling debut in 2025. According to Artificial Analysis, GLM-5.2 scores 51 on the firm’s Intelligence Index v4.1, placing it fourth overall and first among all open-weight models, ahead of MiniMax-M3, DeepSeek V4 Pro and Kimi K2.6. On…