Chinese AI is now on par with Anthropic in terms of cybersecurity: report

Chinese artificial intelligence models have reportedly caught up to top US systems in cybersecurity – a shift that could add pressure on the White House as it works to nail down its domestic AI policy.Security researchers said a new model released this month by China’s Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai, is on par with Anthropic’s flagship Mythos model in some bug-finding scenarios.While the Chinese model – known as GLM-5.2 – still trails U.S.

giants Anthropic and OpenAI in other areas, researchers said the overall performance gap has greatly narrowed, according to the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, a flood of high-powered, cheap-to-use Chinese AI models are quickly drawing customers across the US.Even companies including Microsoft are considering integrating the systems on their platforms, which could shift the competitive balance across the tech industry.According to OpenRouter, which provides access to more than 400 AI models, GLM-5.2 ranks among the 10 most-used AI systems.

Cybersecurity company Semgrep said the model outperformed Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 in some benchmark tests.Researchers also found that, with additional prompting, both Opus 4.8 and GLM-5.2 can match Mythos in finding software bugs.On Wednesday, Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 Security Technology unveiled a new bug-finding tool called Tulongfeng, saying it performs on par with Mythos.

The advances have raised concerns among national security officials and corporate executives.“China is making sure that the gap becomes smaller and smaller over time,” Lior Div, chief executive of cybersecurity company 7AI, told the WSJ.“Genuinely impressed, almost shocked, at how good GLM 5.2 by @zai_org is at coding,” Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of US-based AI firm Vercel, wrote on X earlier this month.“This changes things.”AI’s growing capacity to identify software vulnerabilities has increased pressure to use the technology to patch security flaws before hackers can exploit them.

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