Are affordable Chinese AI models becoming the enterprise standard? Report

Developed by Hong Kong-based Z.ai, formerly known as Zhipu AI, GLM-5.2 is being described by Jefferies strategist Christopher Wood as another "DeepSeek moment." While DeepSeek disrupted the AI landscape by demonstrating that sophisticated models could be built at significantly lower costs, GLM-5.2 takes the competition a step further by targeting enterprise customers. According to the report, industry feedback suggests the model delivers performance close to Anthropic's leading AI systems while costing only about one-quarter as much per token.

Anthropic has emerged as one of the fastest-growing AI companies globally, with its annualised revenue run rate jumping from $4.9 billion at the end of 2025 to $47 billion in May 2026. However, as the latest Chinese AI models compete not only on benchmark performance but also on affordability and overall capability, businesses may find it difficult to justify paying substantially higher prices for only incremental improvements.

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Shift in user preference

A shift in user preference is already underway, according to the data. Figures cited by Jefferies from AI platform OpenRouter show that Chinese AI models processed 21.37 trillion tokens in late April. During the same period, leading US AI models processed 5.76 trillion tokens, highlighting the rapid adoption of lower-cost Chinese alternatives.

The report argues that, as the technology matures, pricing, deployment flexibility and data privacy could become more important competitive differentiators than raw model performance. It also suggests that cheaper AI models may ultimately benefit semiconductor companies rather than hurt them, as lower prices are expected to encourage businesses to deploy AI across a wider range of applications.

Jefferies cautions that the biggest long-term risk to the AI investment cycle is not the rise of Chinese models, but whether companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic can generate sufficient returns on the massive sums being invested in AI infrastructure. As a result, GLM-5.2 could prove more disruptive than DeepSeek, not because of superior performance, but because of the aggressive pricing at which it offers comparable capabilities.