A new, inexpensive Chinese AI model is catching up with Anthropic, OpenAI on their home turf

Since Deep Seek shocked markets early last year with its cheap but powerful AI model, global consumers have been faced with a choice: Chinese offerings with lower prices and less capability or Open AI or Anthropic, which have poured ​billions into development. A model called GLM-5.2, launched last month by Beijing-based startup Z.ai, may finally be closing that gap in terms of Western interest. GLM-5.2 has Silicon Valley buzzing with its coding and ‌agent capabilities, or the ability to execute complex tasks with minimal prompting, that almost rival leading US offerings at a fraction of the cost, in what some experts are calling a “mini DeepSeek moment.” It has quickly climbed the usage charts on third-party AI developer platforms like OpenRouter, where it now ranks above Anthropic’s models, while executives from cloud data platform Snowflake’s CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen have lauded its abilities. “We now have a Chinese open-weight model that is as good as the currently available models ​from OpenAI and Anthropic,” said David Sacks, US President Donald Trump’s former AI czar, last week before Washington lifted curbs on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models on Tuesday. Those capabilities have put Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 model ​at the heart of a growing debate about whether China is finally catching up to the US in the AI race, as technology executives warn that Washington’s unpredictable ⁠regulation of the industry risks hampering its lead in the frontier technology. “It is just a tick below Opus 4.8 (from Anthropic) and right up there with GPT 5.5 (from OpenAI),” Sacks said of GLM-5.2 on the All-In podcast, adding ​that “we cannot afford to do things that slow our companies down.” The Anthropic curbs and the delayed public rollout of OpenAI’s latest GPT-5.6 model have fueled global demand for the Chinese model, some experts said. “The international developer community is increasingly ​aware that relying solely on proprietary, US-based API models