Multiple independent sources told 36Kr that Z.ai’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached USD 1 billion in July.
Over the past year, coding and video generation models have emerged as two of the artificial intelligence sector’s strongest revenue drivers.
Outside China, Anthropic’s Claude Code reached USD 1 billion in ARR just six months after its launch. The product’s growth also helped lift Anthropic’s valuation to nearly USD 1 trillion in May, surpassing OpenAI.
Investors, however, had long questioned whether Chinese foundation model companies could replicate Anthropic’s financial success.
Anthropic benefits from operating in North America, where businesses are more willing to pay for software and the subscription ecosystem is more mature. Its valuation is also roughly an order of magnitude above Z.ai’s latest market capitalization, giving it access to a deeper pool of capital for the computing capacity and other resources needed to train models. Chinese developers have yet to match that advantage.
