The next iteration from the Beijing-based company, GLM-5.3, will bring improved coding capabilities that will help it close the gap on AI leaderboard toppers like Anthropic's Fable 5, the company said in a statement. Z.ai, also known as Zhipu, is iterating fast: GLM-5.3 is built atop the same 700-billion-parameter base model as its predecessor released in June.

Z.ai plans to release the new large language model's weights — the underlying parameters that allow developers to download and customize the system — within two weeks. It hasn't yet shared any benchmark or test scores to demonstrate exactly where it ranks on the global stage, but GLM-5.2 was already celebrated for making significant advances and offering strong performance at a much lower cost than US competitors.

The US and China are engaged in a white-hot race for dominance in emerging technologies including AI. San Francisco-based Anthropic and OpenAI are widely recognized for having the most capable models, though recent weeks have seen Chinese companies achieve comparable performance at a lower cost. Moonshot's Kimi, DeepSeek's latest V4 models, and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s Qwen have each ranked highly in artificial intelligence tests. Z.ai is amping up the competition by also releasing its product with a permissive license that aims to attract the most users and developers.

The opportunity for Z.ai to grab more market share is opening up. DeepSeek on Thursday announced a price increase of up to fourfold for its V4 Flash and Pro models, though the blended price for V4 Pro remains lower than that of GLM-5.2, according to Artificial Analysis. The third-party evaluator gives DeepSeek's top model and GLM-5.2 the same intelligence score of 53, trailing Kimi K3 as well as US frontier offerings such as Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT 5.6.

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Z.ai is one of China's AI pioneers and the world's first large language model maker to go public. At its peak following GLM-5.2's release, its market value surged to $137 billion, surpassing internet giants such as PDD Holdings Inc. and NetEase Inc. It has since fallen to roughly $80 billion — still a tenfold gain since its January listing in Hong Kong.