Zhipu leads rally in Chinese AI stocks, surging 30%, as a wave of new releases hits market

Hong Kong-listed Zhipu AI — that trades as Knowledge Atlas Technology — surged 30% after releasing its GLM-5, an open-source large-language model with enhanced coding capabilities and long-running agent tasks.

The company said the model approaches Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in coding benchmarks while surpassing Google’s Gemini 3 Pro on some tests. CNBC could not verify those claims.

MiniMax, which on Wednesday’s launched its M2.5 open-source model on its overseas website, saw shares in Hong Kong jump 11%. The company describes M2 as “a model built for Max coding & agentic workflows.”

The Shanghai STAR AI Industry Index climbed 1.7% before paring gains.

The rally comes amid intensifying competition in AI as Chinese developers race to match U.S. rivals with a flurry of new model and agent releases.

DeepSeek, which took the world by storm last year, also upgraded its flagship AI model on Wednesday, adding support for a larger context window and more up-to-date knowledge, according to a report from the South China Morning Post.

Ant Group also released its open-source AI model, Ming-Flash-Omni 2.0, on Wednesday. The “unified multimodal model” is capable of generating speech, music, sound effects and visuals.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Wednesday called for a comprehensive push to implement AI “in diverse scenarios to unlock the potential of the technology.”