Zhipu AI Shares Surge as New Model Challenges Global Leaders

The release of GLM-5 on Wednesday served as the primary catalyst for the rally, according to a note from Jefferies analysts. Designed for complex reasoning and agentic engineering tasks, the model currently ranks just behind industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard. In a sign of growing commercial confidence, Zhipu increased the subscription price for its GLM Coding Plan by 30% on Thursday.

Capturing the Enterprise Agent Market

Jefferies analysts noted that Chinese AI firms are uniquely positioned to dominate the domestic enterprise sector through advanced "agentic AI" capabilities. This momentum is reflected across the broader industry as firms rush to deploy updates ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday. Zhipu’s primary rival, Minimax, also saw its stock climb 50% this week after launching its M2.5 model, mirroring the aggressive growth seen across the regional technology sector.

The current wave of releases comes as the industry anticipates a potential move from DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based lab that disrupted the market last year with its R-1 model. Despite ongoing export controls on high-end chips, Chinese developers are maintaining a rapid release cycle to secure market share:

• ByteDance recently launched its Seedance 2.0 video model.
• Alibaba introduced Qwen-Image 2.0 to its generative suite.
• Moonshot AI updated its offerings with the late-January release of Kimi 2.5.

This surge in activity underscores a renewed confidence in China's ability to innovate within the constraints of the global hardware trade. As Zhipu and its peers scale their operations, the focus has shifted from basic chat functions to sophisticated agents capable of handling enterprise-level coding and logic tasks.