Z.ai

Z.AI Co., Ltd., branded internationally as Z.ai, is a Chinese artificial intelligence company; their flagship product is the GLM (General Language Model) family of open weights large language models (LLMs). Formerly known as Zhipu AI outside China until 2025, it is China's first major LLM company to make initial public offering, on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026. With a market capitalization of US$62 billion as of August 2026, it is the most valuable public AI pure play in China. Founded in Beijing in 2019 by Jie Tang as a Tsinghua University spin-out, researchers introduced the first GLM version in May 2022, preceding the AI boom. Z.ai's models have released under the free and open-source MIT License since July 2025; they have also released vision language models, text-to-video models, and the ZCode AI coding harness. As of 2024, it is one of China's six "AI tiger" companies by investors and considered to be the third-largest LLM market player in China according to the International Data Corporation. In January 2025, the United States Commerce Department blacklisted the company in its Entity List due to national security concerns. Z.ai owns AMiner, a research database similar to Google Scholar.