Zhipu AI

Zhipu AI, branded internationally as Z.ai, is a Chinese artificial intelligence company spun out from Tsinghua University in June 2019. The company builds on research from the university's Knowledge Engineering Group, combining expertise in knowledge graphs with deep learning to develop large language models. Its Chinese name, Zhipu, means Knowledge Spectrum, reflecting an ambition to map comprehensive human knowledge into neural networks. Zhipu AI went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2025 under the ticker 2513.

The company's flagship product family is GLM (General Language Model), which includes the open-source ChatGLM, GLM-130B, CodeGeeX for code generation, CogVLM for vision-language tasks, and CogView for image generation. In July 2024, Zhipu debuted Ying, a text-to-video model. The latest iteration, GLM 5.2 released in June 2026, has been described as closing within a percentage point of Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on agentic benchmarks while costing roughly one-fifth as much. Zhipu has released many of its models under the MIT License since July 2025, contributing to the open-source AI ecosystem.

Zhipu AI generated $168 million in annual recurring revenue in 2024 and reached a valuation of approximately $3 billion by early 2025. The company's stock surged nearly 1,000% in 2026, making Chairman Liu Debing worth $22.4 billion. Major investors include Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, Ant Group, Xiaomi, and HongShan, with total state-backed investments exceeding $1.4 billion according to OpenAI. The company employs over 800 people and has expanded internationally with offices in the Middle East, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Malaysia, as well as joint innovation centers across Southeast Asia. In January 2025, the U.S. Commerce Department placed Zhipu AI on its Entity List due to national security concerns. [edit]