GoKawiilOn June 12th, the U.S. Commerce Department issued an export-control directive barring Anthropic from supplying Fable 5 or Mythos 5 to any foreign national, forcing the company to disable both models worldwide. The next day, Beijing-based Z.ai, formerly Zhipu AI, began rolling out GLM-5.2, an open-weight model it released under a permissive MIT license. The new model was purportedly trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips with no Nvidia hardware.
Within a week, GLM-5.2 had climbed to the top of the openly available leaderboards, Z.ai's market value had passed HK$1 trillion (about US$128 billion), and the most capable model many users outside the U.S. could legally access was a free download from a company that sits on Washington's trade blacklist.
Trailing Anthropic
GLM-5.2’s results are both strong and uneven, taking first place on Design Arena's human-preference coding board, finishing roughly 10 Elo points ahead of Fable. It also ranks as the top openly available model on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index v4.1, where its score of 51 sits ahead of MiniMax-M3, DeepSeek V4 Pro, and Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview. On the SWE-bench Pro, it scored 62.1, compared to GPT-5.5's 58.6.
Latest Videos From Watch full video here:
In terms of longer work, such as Code Arena’s front-end board, the picture changes somewhat, with GLM-5.2 landing second behind Fable 5. On Artificial Analysis's AA-Briefcase test, which scores multi-week knowledge tasks built from thousands of fragmented inputs, Fable 5 led with 1,587 Elo, followed by Opus 4.8 at 1,356, and GLM-5.2 in third place at 1,266, before the export ban took Fable out of contention.
It also trails on raw terminal work, scoring 81.0 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 against Opus 4.8's 85.0 and GPT-5.5's 84.0, while clearing Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro at 74.0. GLM-5.2 holds the top accessible position today, partly because the models that beat it on these benchmarks are largely an Anthropic pair, and Fable is now switched off.
No Nvidia
GLM-5.2’s training stack is a slap in the face of Washington’s efforts to curtail Chinese model development. Z.ai has been on the U.S. Entity List since January 2025, cutting it off from Nvidia's H100, H200, and B200 accelerators, and it says the GLM-5 family was trained on roughly 100,000 Huawei Ascend 910B processors using the MindSpore framework, with no Nvidia silicon at any stage. The export controls on advanced AI chips were designed to keep this kind of result out of reach, but they’ve evidently failed to do so.
That said, the Ascend 910C sits at roughly 60% of an Nvidia H100’s inference performance, per a December report from the Council on Foreign Relations, with a wide gap on efficiency and cluster scale. The same report projects that by as early as next year, the best U.S. chips could be more than 17 times more powerful than Huawei's top parts.
... continue reading