Zhipu surges up to 48% and open-sources GLM-5.2 as Wall Street bets on China after Anthropic curbs

Shares of Chinese AI developer Zhipu surged between 33% and 48% after JPMorgan raised its price target and named the company a likely beneficiary of Washington's order suspending Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals. The market read was blunt: if US frontier labs are restricted from serving the world, demand will route to Chinese and open-weight alternatives. Zhipu leaned in, announcing that its latest and most capable model, GLM-5.2, would ship as open-source software — a direct contrast to the closed, regulator-controlled Anthropic models.

The move crystallizes a 'modularity over dominance' theme building all week, as developers increasingly favor orchestrating multiple swappable models over betting on a single US incumbent. Combined with Mistral's reported €3B raise and DeepSeek's continued momentum, the Anthropic curbs are being framed across developer forums as a strategic own-goal that accelerates the open-weight ecosystem the US restrictions were meant to contain.

Separately, Jack Ma-backed Ant Group is undertaking a high-stakes overhaul of its billion-user Alipay app around an AI assistant called 'Ah Bao,' capable of tasks like booking rides and buying funds — underscoring how aggressively Chinese tech is embedding agentic AI into mass-market consumer products. The combination of regulatory tailwinds, open-weight releases, and consumer deployment suggests the competitive center of gravity may be shifting faster than US policymakers anticipated. Watch how GLM-5.2 benchmarks against frontier closed models once independently tested.