Chinese artificial intelligence models are rapidly closing the cybersecurity gap with leading US systems, raising new questions about Washington’s efforts to restrict access to its most advanced technology.
GLM 5.2, a new open weight model from China’s Zhipu AI, matched or surpassed Anthropic models in some software vulnerability tests, according to security researchers.
Semgrep found that GLM 5.2 scored 39% on one benchmark designed to detect access control vulnerabilities, compared with 32% for Claude Code. The Chinese model also performed at a fraction of the cost.
The results do not mean GLM 5.2 has matched Anthropic or OpenAI across every task. It continues to trail leading US models in some broader reasoning and general capability tests.
However, its performance suggests that access to advanced cybersecurity capabilities is spreading beyond a small group of closed US systems.
