AI 2026: Z.ai is Open to Government Customers in China and Abroad
The Chinese AI startup is a sister organization to a top Chinese academic computer science lab. As it seeks a viable business strategy, it has not shied away from government customers.
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Z.ai, known as Zhipu AI until 2025, is a Chinese artificial intelligence startup founded in 2019 by Tang Jie and Li Juanzi, both professors at Tsinghua University, Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping’s alma mater and one of China’s most prestigious universities. Alongside companies like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, it is one of the leading AI startups in China, known primarily for the “GLM” series of open-source large language models (LLMs) with low costs of inference i.e. usage and high performance, especially on coding and “agent” tasks. The company is headquartered in Beijing and reportedly employs around 500 people, with a core research team of between 100 to 200 staff members.1 It is led by CEO Zhang Peng, an AI researcher and Tsinghua alumnus, and was one of the first companies in China to build a large language model before the viral release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022.