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Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Co., Ltd.,[1][a] branded internationally as Z.ai,[2][3] 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.[4][5][2] 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 “AI tiger” companies by investors and considered to be the third-largest LLM market player in China’s AI industry according to the International Data Corporation.[6] In January 2025, the United States Commerce Department blacklisted the company in its Entity List due to national security concerns.[7]

History

Company logo from 2019 to 2025

Founded in 2019, the startup company began from Tsinghua University and was later spun out as an independent company.[8][9] 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.[10]

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.[11][12][13] In March 2024, Zhipu AI announced it was developing a Sora-like technology to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).[14] In May 2024, the Saudi Arabian finance firm Prosperity7 Ventures, LLC participated in a USD $400 million financing round for Zhipu AI with a valuation of approximately 3 billion USD.[15] In July 2024, they debuted the Ying text-to-video model.[16]

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.[17] In May 2025, the company sealed a 61.28 million yuan deal from the Chinese government for city projects in Hangzhou.[9] 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.[18] In May 2025, the company sealed a 61.28 million yuan deal from the Chinese government for city projects in Hangzhou.[9]

In July 2025, Zhipu AI released GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air, their next generation language models,[19] and the company rebranded itself as Z.ai internationally.[2][4][5] In August 2025, Z.ai announced that their GLM models are compatible with Huawei’s Ascend processors.[5] On August 11, 2025, Z.ai released a new vision-language model (VLM) with a total of 106B parameters, GLM-4.5V.[20][21][22] In late September 2025, the company released GLM-4.6 using China’s domestic chips such as those from Cambricon Technologies.[23][24][25][26] Z.ai released GLM-4.6V and GLM-4.7 in December 2025.[27][28] That same year, the company changed its official name to Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC Ltd.[29][30]

On 8 January 2026, Z.ai held its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to become a listed company.[31][32][33] It is considered to be China’s first major LLM company that went through an IPO.[33]

On February 11, 2026, Z.ai released GLM-5.[34][35][36]

In late February 2026, Z.ai’s shares fell by 23%, and had 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.[37]

In late March, 2026, Z.ai released the GLM-5.1 model to subscription users. On April 8th, 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%.[38][39][40]

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.[41] GLM 4.5, released in July 2025 by Z.ai, can run on eight NVIDIA H20 chips.[42] 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.[24][25]
  • Ying, a text-to-video model that generates image and text prompts into a six-second video clip for around 30 seconds.[16]
  • 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.[43]
  • 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).[44] In January 2025, the United States Commerce Department added the company to its Entity List, citing national security concerns.[7]

Models

List of models
Name Release date License Ref.
GLM-4-Plus August 2024 Proprietary [17]
GLM-4-Voice October 2024 Source-available [17][45]
GLM-4.1V-Thinking July 2025 MIT [46][47]
GLM-4.5 July 2025 [4][48]
GLM-4.5V August 2025 [20][49]
GLM-4.6 September 2025 [23][26][50]
GLM-4.6V December 2025 [27][51]
GLM-4.7 December 2025 [28][52]
GLM-5 February 2026 [35][36][34][53]
GLM-5.1 April 2026 [38][39][40][54]

See also

References

  1. ^ “KNOWLEDGE ATLAS TECHNOLOGY JOINT STOCK CO. LTD. – H SHARES (2513)”. Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Retrieved 26 January 2026.
  2. ^ a b c Thorbecke, Catherine (14 October 2025). “China’s AI Dragons Must Survive ‘Involution’ to Conquer the World”. Bloomberg.com. Analysts have pegged Zhipu, recently rebranded abroad as Z.ai, as one of the so-called Little Dragons or AI Tigers…
  3. ^ Wolf, Nate. “Zhipu AI Stock Rises After Hong Kong IPO as More Chinese AI Offerings Line Up”. Barron’s. Retrieved 10 February 2026. Also known as Z.ai, the company describes itself as China’s largest independent large language model developer.
  4. ^ a b c Cheng, Evelyn (28 July 2025). “China’s latest AI model claims to be even cheaper to use than DeepSeek”. CNBC. Retrieved 19 August 2025.
  5. ^ a b c “Unicorn Z.ai adapts models for Huawei chips to broaden China’s AI ecosystem”. South China Morning Post. 9 August 2025. Retrieved 19 August 2025.
  6. ^ “Baidu, SenseTime lead China’s market for business-focused LLMs, says IDC”. South China Morning Post. 22 August 2024. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  7. ^ a b Butts, Dylan (26 June 2025). “Blacklisted by the U.S. and backed by Beijing, this Chinese AI startup has caught OpenAI’s attention”. CNBC. Retrieved 13 September 2025.
  8. ^ “China’s AI startups race for customers as titans like Alibaba cut prices”. Nikkei Asia. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  9. ^ a b c “Zhipu AI sees tenfold surge in foreign users as Chinese AI gains traction”. South China Morning Post. 4 November 2025. Retrieved 13 November 2025.
  10. ^ Du, Zhengxiao; Qian, Yujie; Liu, Xiao; Ding, Ming; Qiu, Jiezhong; Yang, Zhilin; Tang, Jie (May 2022). “GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling”. In Muresan, Smaranda; Nakov, Preslav; Villavicencio, Aline (eds.). Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Dublin, Ireland: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 320–335. doi:10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.26. Retrieved 12 April 2026.
  11. ^ Kharpal, Arjun (20 October 2023). “Alibaba, Tencent among investors in China’s rival to OpenAI with million funding”. CNBC. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  12. ^ “Alibaba and Tencent lead US million total investment this year in Zhipu AI”. South China Morning Post. 20 October 2023. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  13. ^ “Alibaba, Tencent Join Big Backers for Chinese AI Startup Zhipu”. Bloomberg.com. 20 October 2023. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  14. ^ “Zhipu AI says it is developing Sora-like technology as a path to AGI”. South China Morning Post. 16 March 2024. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  15. ^ “Saudi Fund Joins Million Financing for China AI Firm Zhipu”. Bloomberg.com. 31 May 2024. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  16. ^ a b “Zhipu AI launches video model as more Chinese tech firms take on OpenAI’s Sora”. South China Morning Post. 27 July 2024. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
  17. ^ a b c Nguyen, Britney (10 March 2025). “Meet the ‘Six Tigers’ that dominate China’s AI industry”. Quartz. Retrieved 12 April 2026.
  18. ^ Chang, Ollie (18 April 2025). “Zhipu AI becomes first of China’s ‘AI Six’ to pursue IPO”. DigiTimes. Retrieved 12 April 2026.
  19. ^ “GLM-4.5: Reasoning, Coding, and Agentic Abilities”. 28 July 2025. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  20. ^ a b Hao Miao (11 August 2025). “智谱视觉推理模型 GLM-4.5V 上线并开源，号称”全球 100B 级效果最佳”“ [Zhipu’s Vision-Language Model GLM-4.5V Launches and Is Open-Sourced, Hailed as the “Best-Performing 100B-Class Model Globally”]. ITHome (in Chinese). Retrieved 11 April 2026.
  21. ^ “zai-org/GLM-4.5V · Hugging Face”. huggingface.co. 18 August 2025. Retrieved 25 August 2025.
  22. ^ “GLM-4.5V”. Z.AI API DOC. Retrieved 25 August 2025.
  23. ^ a b Chow, Vincent (1 October 2025). “China’s Z.ai targets US AI leaders with new flagship model as coding wars heat up”. South China Morning Post. Retrieved 11 April 2026.
  24. ^ a b Chang, Vicky (6 October 2025). “China Recap | The nation’s AI drive”. KrASIA. Retrieved 9 October 2025.
  25. ^ a b “智谱发布新一代大模型GLM-4.6，寒武纪、摩尔线程已适配-36氪”. 36kr.com. 9 October 2025. Retrieved 9 October 2025.
  26. ^ a b “GLM-4.6: Advanced Agentic, Reasoning and Coding Capabilities”. Z.ai. 30 September 2025. Retrieved 11 April 2026.
  27. ^ a b Franzen, Carl (8 December 2025). “Z.ai debuts open source GLM-4.6V, a native tool-calling vision model for multimodal reasoning”. VentureBeat. Retrieved 11 April 2026.
  28. ^ a b “Introducing the Chinese-made AI ‘GLM-4.7,’ which is strong in coding, and an open model that surpasses Gemini 3.0 Pro in some tests”. Gigazine [jp]. 23 December 2025. Retrieved 11 April 2026.
  29. ^ “Chinese AI ‘tiger’ Zhipu moves closer to US$300 million Hong Kong listing”. South China Morning Post. 20 December 2025. Retrieved 26 January 2026.
  30. ^ “Knowledge Atlas Tech Joint (2513.HK)”. Yahoo Finance. Retrieved 26 January 2026. The company was formerly known as Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd. Knowledge Atlas Technology Joint Stock Company Limited was incorporated in 2019 and is based in Beijing, China.
  31. ^ Chuang, Aileen (8 January 2026). “3 Chinese AI, robotics stocks gain in Hong Kong debuts”. South China Morning Post. Retrieved 8 January 2026.
  32. ^ Cha, Sangmi (8 January 2026). “China’s AI Firm Zhipu Climbs in Debut, Lagging Hardware Peers”. Bloomberg News.
  33. ^ a b Butts, Dylan (8 January 2026). “The first of China’s ‘AI tigers’ goes public as Zhipu climbs in Hong Kong debut”. CNBC. Retrieved 26 January 2026.
  34. ^ a b “GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering”. Z.ai. Retrieved 11 February 2026.
  35. ^ a b Chow, Vincent (12 February 2026). “China’s Zhipu AI launches new major model GLM-5 in challenge to its rivals”. South China Morning Post. Retrieved 17 February 2026.
  36. ^ a b Mo, Liam; Goh, Brenda; Chen, Laurie (11 February 2026). D’Silva, Anil (ed.). “Chinese AI startup Zhipu releases new flagship model GLM-5”. Reuters. Retrieved 17 February 2026.
  37. ^ “Zhipu AI’s shares tumble nearly 23% on computing woes, user complaints”. South China Morning Post. 23 February 2026.
  38. ^ a b Chang, Minxiao (8 April 2026). “China’s Zhipu AI open-sources flagship model, raises prices to narrow gap with US rivals”. South China Morning Post. Archived from the original on 9 April 2026. Retrieved 10 April 2026.
  39. ^ a b Thomas, Prasanth Aby (8 April 2026). “Z.ai unveils GLM-5.1, enabling AI coding agents to run autonomously for hours”. Computerworld. Retrieved 11 April 2026.
  40. ^ a b “GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks”. Z.ai. Retrieved 9 April 2026.
  41. ^ “ChatGLM — NVIDIA NeMo Framework User Guide latest documentation”. docs.nvidia.com. Retrieved 2 November 2024.
  42. ^ Ginn, Aaron (5 August 2025). “China’s Z.ai and America’s Self-Defeating AI Strategy”. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 19 August 2025.
  43. ^ “China’s Zhipu AI says its app can operate your smartphone for you”. South China Morning Post. 30 October 2024. Retrieved 2 November 2024.
  44. ^ Potkin, Fanny (23 April 2025). “Zhipu AI ramps up overseas expansion strategy ahead of IPO”. Reuters. Retrieved 19 January 2026.
  45. ^ “LICENSE · zai-org/glm-4-voice-9b”. Hugging Face. 25 October 2024. Retrieved 12 April 2026.
  46. ^ Wen Zhou (2 July 2025). “智谱获浦东创投、张江集团 10 亿元战略投资，开源发布新一代通用视觉语言模型 GLM-4.1V-Thinking” [Zhipu Secures ¥1 Billion in Strategic Investment from Pudong Venture Capital and Zhangjiang Group, Open-Sources Next-Generation General-Purpose Vision-Language Model GLM-4.1V-Thinking]. ITHome (in Chinese). Retrieved 12 April 2026.
  47. ^ “README.md · zai-org/GLM-4.1V-9B-Thinking”. 25 October 2025. Retrieved 12 April 2026 – via Hugging Face.
  48. ^ “README.md · zai-org/GLM-4.5”. 11 August 2025. Retrieved 12 April 2026 – via Hugging Face.
  49. ^ “README.md · zai-org/GLM-4.5V”. 25 October 2025. Retrieved 11 April 2026 – via Hugging Face.
  50. ^ “README.md · zai-org/GLM-4.6”. 30 September 2025. Retrieved 11 April 2026 – via Hugging Face.
  51. ^ “README.md · zai-org/GLM-4.6V”. 9 December 2025. Retrieved 11 April 2026 – via Hugging Face.
  52. ^ “README.md · zai-org/GLM-4.7”. 8 January 2026. Retrieved 11 April 2026 – via Hugging Face.
  53. ^ “README.md · zai-org/GLM-5”. 5 April 2026. Retrieved 11 April 2026 – via Hugging Face.
  54. ^ “README.md · zai-org/GLM-5.1”. 8 April 2026. Retrieved 11 April 2026 – via Hugging Face.

Notes

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