China’s Z.AI (Zhipu) confirmed it’s responsible for the viral - and mysterious - Ox Alpha AI model that swept to the top of online usage charts this weekend, pushing its shares up as much as 12% on Thursday. The Beijing-based company said it intends to price use of the model, now called GLM-5.3-Flash, at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, or units of artificial intelligence work. That puts it alongside DeepSeek in the class of low-cost, very high-efficiency models that are attracting users away from premium-tier offerings from the likes of Anthropic PBC.
As part of the reveal, Zhipu AI launched its latest open-weight model, GLM-5.3-Flash, f/k/a Ox Alpha, saying that the system ran entirely on a cluster of 100,000 domestically produced chips during a high-profile stealth trial.
In other words, not only is China dominating the open-weight model, it will soon dominate the hardware the is used to run it, precisely as we warned a week ago.
With open model token prices rising, one can guess what is going on at Anthropic and ChatGPT.
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 13, 2026
What happens when China floods the world with cheap Ascend chips to power the Chinese open models https://t.co/8u0zDGUgwM pic.twitter.com/NGn3T78UOo
Following the news, Zhipu’s shares closed more than 12%&n
