There’s a new Chinese model gaining buzz among developers: Zhipu AI’s GLM 4.7. That in itself is not new, but what did catch our attention was where it’s becoming popular: the U.S., our own turf.
I first spotted Zhipu’s post on WeChat, announcing that the new coding tool was seeing so much demand, it would start limiting access. A year after DeepSeek’s R1 model shook the artificial intelligence landscape in the U.S., AI experts are saying that they’re seeing Chinese AI models spreading around the world. I wanted to see if that was also true for Zhipu.
I reached out to the company, with no expectations of hearing back, just as DeepSeek has never responded to our requests. But Zhipu recently went public in Hong Kong, and its investor relations team is on top of the ball. They replied almost immediately, telling me that “the user base of Zhipu GLM Coding Plan is primarily concentrated in the United States and China.”
American developers have always told us of the bias against using Chinese models — so for Zhipu to be gaining traction here suggested a real DeepSeek-like breakout moment.
Just last week, we were floored by the apps that Replit and Claude Code were able to produce in minutes. They felt like the frontier of AI, an example of how American innovation is leading the way. It’s also creating a tangible shift, leading to a 60% surge in new app releases. But if a model out of China is just as powerful and easy to use, are they really six months behind like Google
