Chinese artificial intelligence company Z.ai, also known as Zhipu, has released the latest version of its flagship model, stepping up competition with US leaders OpenAI and Anthropic with a focus on stronger coding capabilities and open access.The Beijing-based company’s new GLM-5.3 builds on the same roughly 700-billion-parameter base model as GLM-5.2, which was released in June, but is designed to deliver a significant improvement in coding and other capabilities.Also Read: China's Zhipu posts 132% rise in annual revenue on AI boomZ.ai plans to release the model's weights, the underlying parameters that allow developers to download, modify and customise an AI system, within two weeks. The company said benchmark results showed GLM-5.3 substantially outperforming its already well-regarded predecessor and approaching, and in some tests approaching, Anthropic's Fable 5.The release comes as Chinese AI companies accelerate efforts to challenge the dominance of US developers in increasingly capable large language models.San Francisco-based Anthropic and OpenAI remain widely regarded as having some of the industry's most capable models. But Chinese companies have increasingly narrowed the performance gap, while offering models at lower costs and, in several cases, making their weights openly available to developers.Moonshot AI's Kimi, DeepSeek's latest V4 models and Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen have all scored highly in AI benchmarks. Z.ai is seeking to build on that momentum with a permissive licence intended to attract developers and users to its models.China’s AI challengers gain groundThe competitive landscape is also shifting on price.DeepSeek raised prices for its V4 Flash and Pro models by as much as fourfold on Thursday. Even after the increase, the blended price of V4 Pro remains below that of GLM-5.2, according to Artificial Analysis.The third-party evaluator gives DeepSeek's top model and GLM-5.2 an identical intelligence score of 53. Both trail Kimi K3 as well as US frontier models including Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT 5.6.Also Read: After Anthropic shutdown, China's Z. ai closes frontier gap as it plans dual listingFor Z.ai, the improving performance of Chinese models comes alongside a rapidly expanding commercial footprint.The company is among China's AI pioneers and became the world's first large language model maker to go public. Its market value surged to $137 billion at its peak following the release of GLM-5.2, briefly overtaking Chinese internet companies including PDD Holdings and NetEase.The valuation has since fallen to about $80 billion, although that still represents roughly a tenfold increase from its January listing in Hong Kong.Z.ai has also been building out the computing infrastructure needed to support its models. The company completed a data centre with at least 10,000 Chinese-made chips for developing and deploying its GLM models, Bloomberg reported in July.Its annual recurring revenue, predictable yearly revenue generated from developers and businesses using its services, reached $1 billion in July, according to the report.The latest GLM release adds another contender to a rapidly evolving AI race in which Chinese developers are increasingly competing not only on model performance, but also on cost, accessibility and the ability to let developers build directly on their technology.