Zhipu AI: China’s Anthropic Is Priced for Survival at 750x Revenue

On May 28, shares of Zhipu AI hit an intraday peak valuing the Beijing-based startup at roughly 700 billion Hong Kong dollars (about $90 billion) before a sharp correction set in. For a company that reported just 700 million RMB ($96 million) in 2025 revenue and losses exceeding 4.6 billion RMB, the implied price-to-sales ratio of over 750x raises an obvious question: what exactly is the market pricing? The answer, increasingly, is survival. Zhipu AI has earned the nickname "China's Anthropic" — not merely for its technical ambitions, but because investors are betting it will be one of the last independent LLM developers standing in a shakeout that has already claimed smaller players. The company is simultaneously pursuing a secondary listing on Shanghai's STAR Market, aiming to raise up to 15 billion RMB. By the numbers. Zhipu's flagship model, GLM-5.1, ranks fifth globally on Artificial Analysis's leaderboard (first among Chinese models). On the METR long-horizon benchmark, GLM-5.1 is one of only two models worldwide — alongside OpenAI's o-series — to reach an eight-hour autonomous task horizon. On the Wild Claw Bench, GLM-5 places third globally, the only Chinese model in the top three. And on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent leaderboard, GLM-5.1 is the top-ranked open-source model in the world. Those benchmarks have translated into real traction. Zhipu led all independent Chinese LLM developers in 2024 revenue. Nine of China's largest internet companies embed GLM models deeply into their products. The platform has registered over 4 million developers, with more than 242,000 paying subscribers to its GLM Coding Plan. Token call volume grew 15-fold in just six months — and when Zhipu raised API prices by 83% in Q1 2026, call volume actually increased 400%. The state-backed thesis. Spun out of Tsinghua University's Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) lab, Zhipu has received over 3 billion RMB from state capital. Its MaaS (Model as a Service) cloud revenue share has jumped from 0.4% to 26.3% of total revenue, signaling a shift toward enterprise-grade recurring income. Whether the valuation is rational depends on which China thesis you subscribe to. If GLM-5.1 genuinely narrows the gap with frontier Western models — and if the Chinese enterprise AI market consolidates around two or three winners — Zhipu's current multiple may look prescient. If not, the correction on May 28 may be just the beginning.