Chinas Z.AI Blacklist von Washington, Spott über US -Sanktionen, startet aufgeladene KI mit einer Kriegskasse von 1,5 Mrd. USD, überspringt Western AIS

> Beijing-based Z.ai, recently added to the U.S. Entity List and backed by $1.5 billion in fresh funding, has released two open-source AI models that outperformed most Western counterparts in global benchmarks, challenging U.S. sanctions as it prepares for a Hong Kong listing.

> The startup, formerly known as Zhipu AI, is listed on Washington’s Entity List, a trade restriction tool that blacklists foreign individuals, companies, and other organizations.

> Z.ai’s new open-source model GLM-4.5 **merges reasoning and non-reasoning skills into one fully capable and versatile architecture.** “In the past five years, OpenAI’s GPT-3 learns common-sense knowledge, and o1 uses reinforcement learning to think before responding, significantly improving reasoning skills in coding, data analysis, and complex math,” „However, the resultant models are **still not really general**: some of them are good at coding, some good at math, and some good at reasoning, but **none of them could achieve the best performance across all the different tasks**,“ it said in its post. „GLM-4.5 makes efforts toward the goal of **unifying** all the different capabilities.”

> The U.S. Department of Commerce added Zhipu to its Entity List in January, accusing the company of supporting Beijing’s military advances.

> Companies on the list cannot purchase American technology without special government approval. Zhipu said the designation „will not have a substantial impact“ on its operations.

> Z.ai prices API calls at $0.11 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens—**roughly one-fifth the cost of comparable Western models.** The company released the weights under an MIT license on Hugging Face and GitHub, allowing anyone to download and modify the code.

> The models feature what Z.ai calls „hybrid reasoning“ with two modes.