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Z.ai Founder Says China Will Hit Fable-Class AI This Year, as GLM-5.2 Ships

June 18, 2026 at 18:40 EDT

Foundation Models
Open Source
Software Dev & Coding

Jie Tang, founder of China's Z.ai (Zhipu AI) and a Tsinghua University professor, said in June 2026 that China would reach the AI capability of Anthropic's top-tier "Fable/Mythos" models within the year, just after releasing the company's flagship open-weights model GLM-5.2.

June 2026 · Z.ai (formerly Zhipu AI)

"It won't take that long": China's open AI closes in on the frontier

Days after the US restricted access to Anthropic's Fable 5 / Mythos 5 frontier models, Z.ai released the open-weight GLM-5.2 — the top-scoring open model — as founder Jie Tang signaled fast Chinese catch-up.

Intelligence Index — #1 among open-weight models

1360

Design Arena Elo — led the head-to-head benchmark

~700B

parameters — reflecting strong post-training efficiency

Intelligence Index — closed frontier vs. open-weight

Score out of comparable scale · GLM-5.2 is the only open-weight model shown

Fable 5
closed

Opus 4.8
closed

GPT-5.5
closed

GLM-5.2
open-weight

Why it stands out

Open weights under MIT license — local & self-hostable
1M-token context, High / Max reasoning effort
Hands-on reports of "Opus 4.7–4.8 level" performance

Open questions

Local inference cost inherent to open weights
Gap on long-horizon agentic tasks vs. closed models
Real-world "usefulness" / revenue still to be proven

The political backdrop

"The path to AGI should not be walled off." — Jie Tang, founder of Z.ai

One day before GLM-5.2's release, the US ordered Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals over CBRN and offensive-cyber concerns. Musk had predicted Chinese firms would reach Fable-class AI by Q1 2027 — Tang replied it "won't take that long."

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