Z.ai

Z.ai

Z.ai

Z.AI Co., Ltd.
Z.ai
Zhipu AI (China)
Native name
北京智谱华章科技有限公司
TypePublic
SEHK: 2513
IndustryArtificial intelligence
Founded2019; 7 years ago (2019)
Founders
HeadquartersBeijing, China
Key people
  • Zhang Peng (CEO)
ProductsGLM
Number of employees
800+ (2024)
Website

Z.AI Co., Ltd.,[1][2][a] branded internationally as Z.ai,[3][4] is a Chinese technology company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI). The company was formerly known as Zhipu AI outside China until its rebranding in 2025.[5][6][3] Z.ai's flagship product is the GLM (General Language Model) family of large language models, which the company has released under the free and open-source MIT License since July 2025.

As of 2024, it is one of China's six "AI tiger" companies[7] by investors and considered to be the third-largest LLM market player in China's AI industry according to the International Data Corporation.[8] In January 2025, the United States Commerce Department blacklisted the company in its Entity List due to national security concerns.[9]

History

Logo from 2019 to 2025

Founded in 2019, the startup company began from Tsinghua University and was later spun out as an independent company.[10][11] Researchers published an Association for Computational Linguistics conference paper in May 2022 introducing the GLM (General Language Model) training algorithm, which uses an "autoregressive blank infilling" strategy that creates cloze tests by randomly removing segments of input text and trains the model to autoregressively regenerate the removed text.[12]

In 2023, it raised 2.5 billion yuan (approx. 350 million in USD) from Alibaba Group and Tencent, along with Meituan, Ant Group, Xiaomi, and HongShan.[13][14][15] In March 2024, Zhipu AI announced it was developing a Sora-like technology to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).[16] In May 2024, the Saudi Arabian finance firm Prosperity7 Ventures, LLC participated in a US$400 million financing round for Zhipu AI with a valuation of approximately US$3 billion.[17] In July 2024, they debuted the Ying text-to-video model.[18]

Zhipu released GLM-4-Plus in August 2024. In October 2024, Zhipu released GLM-4-Voice, an end-to-end speech large language model that can adjust its tone or dialect.[19] Zhipu disclosed in April 2025 that it had started preparing for its initial public offering (IPO) and released two models under the free and open-source MIT License.[20] In May 2025, the company sealed a 61.28 million yuan deal from the Chinese government for city projects in Hangzhou.[11]

In July 2025, Zhipu AI released GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air, their next generation language models,[21] and the company rebranded itself as Z.ai internationally.[3][5][6] In August 2025, Z.ai announced that their GLM models are compatible with Huawei's Ascend processors.[6] On August 11, 2025, Z.ai released a new vision-language model (VLM) with a total of 106B parameters, GLM-4.5V.[22][23][24] In late September 2025, the company released GLM-4.6 using China's domestic chips such as those from Cambricon Technologies.[25][26][27][28] Z.ai released GLM-4.6V and GLM-4.7 in December 2025.[29][30] That same year, the company changed its official name to Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC Ltd.[31][32]

On 8 January 2026, Z.ai held its IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to become a listed company.[33][34][35] It is considered to be China's first major LLM company that went through an IPO.[35]

On 12 February 2026, Z.ai released GLM-5.[36][37][38]

In late February 2026, Z.ai's shares fell by 23% as it experienced a shortage of compute resources, leading to user complaints and Z.ai issuing a public call for support. Z.ai also restricted new user signups.[39]

In late March 2026, Z.ai released the GLM-5.1 model to subscription users. On 7 April 2026, Z.ai released GLM-5.1 as open-source. The same day, Z.ai increased its API prices by 10%, but maintained a lower price than its United States competitor Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model. On release, the company's share price increased 11.5%.[40][41][42]

On 16 June 2026, GLM-5.2 was released with a one-million token context window, an increase from GLM-5.1's 200K-token context window.[43][44][45]

Description

Z.AI provides the following products and services:

  • General Language Model (commonly abbreviated as GLM; formerly known as ChatGLM), a series of pre-trained dialogue models initially developed by Zhipu AI and Tsinghua KEG in 2023.[46] GLM 4.5, released in July 2025 by Z.ai, can run on eight NVIDIA H20 chips.[47] The release of GLM-4.6 in late September 2025 marked the first integration of FP8 and Int4 quantization on Cambricon chips. It also supports native FP8 on Moore Threads GPUs.[26][27]
  • Ying, a text-to-video model that generates image and text prompts into a six-second video clip within about 30 seconds.[18]
  • AutoGLM, an AI agent application that uses voice commands to complete tasks within a smartphone. The app can analyze complex tasks such as ordering an item from a nearby store and repeating an order based from the user's shopping history.[48]
  • AMiner, created by Jie Tang (co-founder of Z.ai) in March 2006, now owned by Z.ai.

Z.AI has offices in the Middle East, United Kingdom, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with innovation center projects across Southeast Asia (2025).[49] In January 2025, the United States Commerce Department added the company to its Entity List, citing national security concerns.[9]

Models

See also: GLM (AI)
List of models
Name Release date License Ref.
GLM-4-9B June 2024 Apache 2.0 [50]
GLM-4-Plus August 2024 Proprietary [19]
GLM-4-Voice October 2024 Apache 2.0 [51][19][52]
GLM-4-9B-0414 April 2025 MIT [53]
GLM-4-32B-0414 April 2025 [54]
GLM-4.1V-Thinking July 2025 [55][56]
GLM-4.5 July 2025 [5][57]
GLM-4.5V August 2025 [22][58]
GLM-4.6 September 2025 [25][28][59]
GLM-4.6V December 2025 [29][60]
GLM-4.7 December 2025 [30][61]
GLM-5 February 2026 [37][38][36][62]
GLM-5.1 April 2026 [40][41][42][63]
GLM-5.2 June 2026 [43][44][45]

See also

References

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Notes

  1. ^ formerly as Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd. (Chinese: 北京智谱华章科技有限公司) and Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Co., Ltd.

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