China’s Zhipu AI releases GLM-5, advancing AI development despite U.S. chip restrictions

China's Zhipu AI, released its latest artificial intelligence model on Wednesday, joining a wave of domestic rivals unveiling more sophisticated versions of the technology ahead of the Lunar New Year festival as competition heats up in the sector. The open-source GLM-5 model features enhanced coding capabilities and the ability to perform long-running agent tasks, approaching rival Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 in coding benchmark tests and surpassing Google's Gemini 3 Pro on some benchmarks, the company said in a press release. The latest model was developed using domestically manufactured chips for inference, including Huawei's flagship Ascend chip and products from leading industry players such as Moore Threads, Cambricon and Kunlunxin, according to the statement. Beijing is keen to showcase progress in domestic chip self-sufficiency efforts through advances in frontier AI models, encouraging domestic firms to rely on less advanced Chinese chips for training and inference as the U.S. tightens export curbs on high-end semiconductors. Chinese tech companies have been releasing a flurry of new models to capitalize on the country's AI boom and play catch-up with their U.S. rivals. Domestic competitor MiniMax released its latest M2.5 open-source model on its overseas agent website on Wednesday evening. Last week, ByteDance released Seedance 2.0, a video generation model that drew widespread attention on social media for its ability to create sophisticated videos. That followed rival Kuaishou's launch of its Kling 3.0 video generation model days earlier. Zhipu is considered one of China's "AI tigers" - a group of promising AI startups in the country vying with the United States to lead the development of this frontier technology. Zhipu went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange last month, alongside rival MiniMax, another AI tiger. Both stocks have rallied strongly as investors bet on the companies benefiting from China's AI boom. The GLM-5 release follows a series of updates, including version 4.7 last month and version 4.6 in September. The latest model is also optimised for working with AI agents such as OpenClaw, the company said. The company has positioned its models as having strong coding and agentic capabilities that can perform multi-step tasks. Zhipu, which faces U.S. sanctions, derives most of its revenue from the domestic Chinese market but has overseas ambitions. Chief Executive Zhang Peng told Reuters in a September interview that overseas revenue was beginning to gain traction, though the company has yet to directly compete with U.S. models in consumer subscriptions.