Two new models from Chinese firms compete with top US mainstream and frontier models. Should cyber-defenders be worried?
July 3, 2026
Chinese companies released two new AI models in the past month that have pushed the boundaries of the nation's capabilities for vulnerabilities discovery and caused concerns among some cybersecurity experts.
On June 13, Chinese firm Zhipu AI released an open-weight model, GLM 5.2, that subsequent testing found outperforms Anthropic's Opus and Open AI's GPT-5.5 on some bug-finding benchmarks and costs only $0.17 per vulnerability found. Two weeks later, another firm, 360 Security Technology, released a frontier-model-based security tool, Tulongfeng (aka "Dragon Saber"), that its founder touted as China's version of Mythos, claiming it had already found more than 3,400 vulnerabilities, according to a Reuters report.
While the software that supports the vulnerability-discovery process makes a critical difference, the fact that an open-weight model performed so well in benchmarks highlights that defenders need to pay off their security debt as quickly as possible, says Chris Inglis, the former US National Cyber Director and a strategic advisor for ransomware-defense firm Halcyon.
