Chinese Z.ai’s latest model tops AI ranking charts amid Anthropic Fable 5 ban — blacklisted China firm’s popular open-weight GLM-5.2 AI model powered by Huawei silicon
On 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.
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.
At the same time, Huawei has claimed that a 1,000-chip Ascend cluster handled full-parameter post-training of DeepSeek’s V4. If true, this shows that Chinese domestic silicon can now carry training-class jobs, just not at Nvidia’s per-chip throughput or scale. So, while GLM-5.2 demonstrates that a frontier-class open model can be produced on a fully domestic stack, it doesn’t demonstrate that the chips underneath have caught up with Nvidia; model parity =/= hardware parity.
The Fable 5 shutdown
Anthropic released Fable 5 to the public on June 10th, a safety-restricted build of its Mythos 5 model designed to block the cyber and bio capabilities of the underlying system. Just two days later, the Commerce Department suddenly and unexpectedly ordered access to be pulled for all foreign nationals, including Anthropic’s own non-citizen staff, after officials cited a technique for bypassing Fable 5’s safeguards.
Anthropic said in an announcement following the restriction that the jailbreak it understood to be at issue was narrow rather than universal, surfaced only previously known minor vulnerabilities, and produced behavior also obtainable from other public models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. The company said in its statement that it believes the order rests on a “misunderstanding” and is working to restore access. But because the directive covered all foreign nationals, Anthropic had no way to keep the models live for U.S. users alone and disabled them for everyone.
Meanwhile, GLM-5.2’s MIT license lets anyone download, fine-tune, and self-host its weights, which is the basis for calling it a freely available model. Running it, however, is a separate matter: the model carries around 744 billion total parameters, 40 billion of them active per token, with a one-million-token context window. That’s no small footprint and calls for enterprise GPU clusters or high-memory workstations — it’s not something you’re ever going to get running on a desktop — and throughput drops sharply once context runs past tens of thousands of tokens.
The most practical way to use GLM-5.2 is via the API, where Z.ai prices the model at about $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output, against $5 and $25 for Claude Opus 4.8, or $10 and $50 for Fable 5. On the AA-Briefcase runs, Fable 5 averaged $31 per task to GLM-5.2’s $2.40, a roughly 13-times spread that holds even where Fable scored higher.
The market moved fast with GLM-5.2’s release. Z.ai, which is listed on the Hong Kong exchange as Knowledge Atlas Technology, saw its shares jump as much as 42% intraday on June 22nd to HK$2,980, carrying its market capitalization past HK$1 trillion. Founder Tang Jie has said publicly that a Chinese model matching Fable 5 will arrive sooner than the first-quarter timeline Elon Musk recently floated. There’s a nearer date, too. On July 8th, the lock-up on Z.ai’s first cornerstone investors expires, freeing a large block of shares to trade, which will give the GLM-5.2 rally its first real test.
