Coinbase switches to Chinese AI models

    by Tim Official: Coinbase

    This is the moment Chinese AI outperformed American AI. One of the biggest publicly traded crypto companies has abandoned OpenAI and Anthropic. Coinbase moved to open-weight Chinese models from Zhipu and DeepSeek, cutting nearly 50% of its internal AI costs. The full story at

    Transcript (en)

    Jipu's latest model, it's called GLM 5.2, comes out of China. It has landed with a bang in Silicon Valley, blowing past all other open source models, nearly matching the American frontier for just a fraction of the price. Developers, they're piling in open writer token traffic, showing much quicker adoption for GLM 5.2 than DeepSeek's V4 launch back in April. It was a big deal then. It's a big deal now. This just carries the story that we've been reporting on even further. It all matters because Jipu is hitting at a different moment, though. The trillion dollar sell-off post-DeepSeek That was treated as a kind of a one-off shock, partly because people saw it as a chat bot story. GLM 5.2, this is different. It's strong at agentic work, and that is key. On one agentic benchmark, it is just one percentage point away from Opus 4.8 for a fifth of the cost. Now, Opus 4.8, that is Anthropics' most powerfully available model. So basically, you're getting very close to the same horsepower for just a fraction of a cost. And it really comes at a time when expensive AI is already eating into budgets. And that is a really hard trade off for enterprises, for companies, for Fortune 500 to ignore. Agentic AI is only going to intensify those costs. More complex tasks, more steps, more tokens. So now that GPOO, or also known as Z.AI, is in the picture, agentic open source, it might be the next big threat.