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A new artificial intelligence model from China is catching up to other leading American AI models.
Called GLM 5.2, the company behind it, Z.ai, unleashed it just a day after the United States banned Anthropic from supplying its Fable 5 and Mythos models to non-Americans earlier this month, before the controls were lifted on June 30.
Z.ai claims that its model’s performance is almost on par with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5. It also operates on a 1 million token context window, meaning it can hold roughly 750,000 words in working memory at once.
GLM 5.2 is designed to run long coding tasks and maintains “quality across long, messy coding-agent trajectories,” the company said.
GLM-5.2 was tested on three benchmarks of long, complex coding work. On open-ended technical projects lasting hours to days, it trails Opus 4.8 by just 1% while edging past GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7, the company said.
On a test measuring how well it can improve smaller models using a single GPU, it beats both GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7, ranking second only to Opus 4.8.
On the toughest test marathon-length engineering tasks such as building compilers, it still trails Opus 4.8 by 13%, though it remains second-best overall, according to Z.ai. Across all three, GLM-5.2 is the leading open source model, according to the company.
The AI race
The Chinese model is also open source and has “no regional limits [and] technical access without borders,” the company notes. This means that the AI system can be modified for any purpose, including to change its output and share it for others to use with or without modifications for any reason.
This is unlike AI models from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, which use closed-source models, where the consumer depends on the provider and cannot make any changes to it.
The US and China are in an AI race to lead in the technology that can shape the future of healthcare and have implications for national security. The US has aimed to get ahead by restricting access to semiconductors, while China is on a different path with cheaper open-source models.
In January last year, the China-based company DeepSeek rattled the global AI race by releasing R1, a foundational model that is cheaper and more energy efficient than its US AI competitors.