Z.ai GLM-5.3 upgrade

Z.ai, a Beijing-based AI company also known as Zhipu, announced it will upgrade its flagship AI model to GLM-5.3, which will feature improved coding capabilities and is built on the same roughly 700-billion-parameter base model as its predecessor GLM-5.2. The company plans to release the model's weights within two weeks, allowing developers to download and customize it. Z.ai shared benchmark scores indicating that GLM-5.3 will perform close to, and sometimes ahead of, Anthropic's Fable 5. This release is part of a broader trend of Chinese open-weight AI models competing with US leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI. Despite the positive announcement, Z.ai's shares fell as much as 9% in China — Hong Kong, while rival Minimax Group Inc. fell 16%, attributed to investors cashing in gains ahead of quarterly results. The event highlights the intensifying US-China AI race, with Chinese companies achieving comparable performance at lower cost. Z.ai's market value, which peaked at $137 billion after GLM-5.2's release, has since fallen to roughly $80 billion, still a tenfold gain since its January listing. The company has also completed a data center with at least 10,000 Chinese-made chips and reached $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.