AI TRENDS | Z.ai Plans to Use Domestic Listing Proceeds to Pursue AGI After GLM-5.2 Benchmarks

Mainland AI startup Z.ai said on Thursday it plans to use proceeds from a domestic listing to fund its push toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), after its latest GLM-5.2 model scored close to leading US models from Anthropic and OpenAI on public benchmarks, according to RTHK.

Z.ai said GLM-5.2 ranks fourth on Artificial Analysis' LLM intelligence leaderboard and second on Code Arena's front-end coding leaderboard, and operates at roughly a sixth of the cost of closed US frontier models. The company said the model has 750 billion total parameters and a one-million token context window, and was released with inference adaptation for domestic chip infrastructure users including Huawei Ascend clusters.

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. The company said its GLM-5 series has been adapted since February to run on domestic semiconductors after the United States tightened China's access to advanced Nvidia chips.

RTHK said investor interest has surged, with shares rallying more than 2,000 percent since its Hong Kong debut in January, taking its market capitalisation above HK$1 trillion this week. Z.ai technical lead Zheng Qinkai said the company’s focus is improving the model toward the “upper bound of intelligence.”

Co-founder Tang Jie said in a post on X that Z.ai remains committed to open-source and called Anthropic’s abrupt pulling of its Fable and Mythos models “deeply regrettable.” Z.ai’s next GLM-5.5 model is expected to be released in August.