The US government's shock moves to restrict access to top artificial intelligence systems from Anthropic and OpenAI have sparked growing interest in open-source models -- especially ones from China. Around the same time, China's Zhipu AI (also known as Z. ai) released GLM-5.2, an open model that performed nearly as well as top offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI on several benchmarks.

Beijing has made a slew of moves in recent months to gatekeep its cutting edge and cost-efficient models.

Washington and Beijing are not just competing to build the smartest model. They are competing over who will shape the world’s digital operating system.