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Zhipu AI (Z.ai)

Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai, is a Beijing company founded in 2019 as a Tsinghua University spin-out. It develops the GLM model family and related chatbot, video, agent and coding products, and listed in Hong Kong in January 2026.

Founded 2019Website z.ai Era Large models

13Models & products3Events2People

What it is

Zhipu AI, known in Chinese as 智谱, is an artificial intelligence company based in Beijing. Its full registered Chinese name is 北京智谱华章科技有限公司. Internationally it was known as Zhipu AI until July 2025, when it rebranded as Z.ai. It was later renamed Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC Ltd.[1]

The company's main business is developing large language models, the systems that process and generate natural language. Its models are published under the GLM name.[1]

Origins

Zhipu was founded in Beijing in 2019 as a spin-out of Tsinghua University. A spin-out is a company that grows out of university research and operates as a separate business. Wikipedia lists Tang Jie and Li Juanzi among its founders and names Zhang Peng as its chief executive.[1]

The company's research roots reach back to GLM-130B, released in 2022, and to the GLM pre-training approach, which was published at ACL in May 2022.[1][2] ChatGLM-6B followed in 2023. The company then released a run of models: GLM-4-Plus in August 2024, GLM-4-Voice in October 2024, GLM-4.5 in July 2025, GLM-4.6 in September 2025, GLM-4.7 in December 2025, GLM-5 in February 2026, GLM-5.1 in April 2026, GLM-5.2 in June 2026 and GLM-5.3 in August 2026.[1][2]

The company also owns AMiner, a research database that Tang Jie created in March 2006.[1] AMiner is one of several products that show the company's roots in academic work.

Main features

The GLM family has been released under the MIT License since July 2025.[1] The company's products include the GLM chatbot, formerly ChatGLM, the Ying video generator, the AutoGLM phone agent, the AMiner research database and ZCode, an AI coding environment released on 2 July 2026.[1]

In August 2025 its GLM models were declared compatible with Huawei Ascend processors.[1] On scale, IDC ranked Zhipu as China's third-largest LLM market player, and the company is counted among China's six 'AI tiger' companies.[1] It had more than 800 employees in 2024, and it has offices in the Middle East, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Malaysia.[1]

Place in development

Zhipu's history in the last few years is marked by funding, regulation and a public listing. In 2023 it raised 2.5 billion yuan from Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, Ant Group, Xiaomi and HongShan. In May 2024 it raised US$400 million with Saudi Arabia's Prosperity7 Ventures at a valuation of about US$3 billion.[1]

In January 2025 the U.S. Commerce Department added the company to its Entity List, citing national security concerns.[1] Zhipu disclosed IPO preparations in April 2025, and on 8 January 2026 it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the ticker 2513. By August 2026 its market capitalization was about US$62 billion, which made it China's most valuable public AI pure play.[1] Wikipedia describes it as China's first major LLM company to go public.[1]

For readers of this archive, the company's record runs from the GLM-130B research of 2022 to the GLM-5.3 release of August 2026, and connects the model series to the funding and listing that followed.

CapabilitiesLarge language models

ApplicationsEnterprise

Ecosystem & regionOpen sourceChina

20262

  1. MilestoneMiniMax lists on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange

    MiniMax, a Chinese AI startup, began trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 9 January 2026 under ticker 100, one day after Zhipu AI's debut, with shares rising 42.67% from the HK$165 issue price.

  2. MilestoneZhipu lists on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange

    Zhipu, the large language model developer also known as Knowledge Atlas Technology, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 8 January 2026 under ticker 2513, the first major Chinese LLM company to go public.

20251

  1. PolicyU.S. adds Zhipu AI to the Entity List

    In January 2025 the U.S. Commerce Department placed Zhipu AI, a Tsinghua University spin-out and one of China's AI tiger startups, on its Entity List. The company rejected the decision and later listed in Hong Kong.

Models and products over time

13
  1. 2022
    • Oct 2022 GLM-130B Model

      GLM-130B is a 130-billion-parameter open bilingual Chinese–English dense language model from Tsinghua University's KEG group and Zhipu AI, built to give researchers an open model that matches GPT-3 at the hundred-billion scale.

  2. 2023
    • 2023 ChatGLM-6B Model

      An open bilingual chat model from Zhipu AI and Tsinghua KEG with about 6.2 billion parameters, small enough to run on one consumer GPU, with weights fully open for research.

    • 2023 Z.ai chatbot (ChatGLM / GLM) Product

      The consumer chat product of Zhipu AI, launched as ChatGLM in 2023 and later renamed GLM. It is the web entry point where new Zhipu models such as GLM-5.1 reach ordinary users.

  3. 2024
    • 2024 AutoGLM Agent

      AutoGLM is a voice-driven smartphone agent from Zhipu (Z.ai), one of a family of agent and model releases that Zhipu has also published openly on Hugging Face.

    • Aug 6, 2024 CogVideoX Model

      CogVideoX is an open-source family of text-to-video models from Zhipu AI and Tsinghua University, released starting in August 2024 and derived from the earlier open-source CogVideo.

  4. 2025
    • Jul 2025 GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5-Air Model

      GLM-4.5 is Zhipu's open-weight language model, released in July 2025 with 355 billion total parameters and a lighter sibling, GLM-4.5-Air. Both are hybrid reasoning models released under the MIT License.

    • Aug 11, 2025 GLM-4.5V Model

      A vision-language model released by Zhipu on 11 August 2025, built on GLM-4.5-Air and covering image, video, long-document and GUI tasks; Zhipu reports state-of-the-art results at its scale on 42 benchmarks.

    • Sep 2025 GLM-4.6 Model

      GLM-4.6 is an open-weights large language model released by Zhipu in late September 2025, with a 200K-token context window, about 357 billion parameters and an MIT licence, aimed at coding, reasoning and agent work.

    • Dec 2025 GLM-4.7 Model

      GLM-4.7 is Zhipu's open-weights language model released in December 2025, aimed at multilingual agentic coding and terminal tasks. It reports clear gains over GLM-4.6 on software-engineering benchmarks and ships under the MIT license.

  5. 2026
    • Feb 12, 2026 GLM-5 Model

      GLM-5 is Zhipu's open model released on 12 February 2026 under the MIT License, with 744 billion parameters and 40 billion active. It was built for agentic engineering.

    • Apr 7, 2026 GLM-5.1 Model

      GLM-5.1 is Zhipu AI's open-source large language model released in April 2026, built for coding and long-running agent tasks and notable for topping SWE-Bench Pro ahead of competing frontier models in Zhipu's own comparison.

    • Jun 16, 2026 GLM-5.2 Model

      Zhipu's open-weight language model released in June 2026 under the MIT License, with a 1M-token context, a shared sparse-attention indexer, and higher reasoning and coding scores than GLM-5.1.

    • Aug 14, 2026 GLM-5.3 Model

      GLM-5.3 is Zhipu's open-weight language model released on 14 August 2026. It keeps the GLM-5.2 base model and gains its improvements from post-training, with reported state-of-the-art open results on agentic coding and cybersecurity benchmarks.

People2

Tang Jie2019–Zhang Peng

Notes and sources

  1. Z.ai (Zhipu AI)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhipu_AI
  2. GLM-130B repositoryhttps://github.com/THUDM/GLM-130B
  3. zai-org modelshttps://huggingface.co/api/models?author=zai-org&sort=createdAt

Cite this page: Zhipu AI (Z.ai). TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/companies/zhipu-ai. Updated 2026-11-08