J.P. Morgan Rating of SmartScale GLM-5.2: Ranks Among Top Global Leaders but Still Faces Challenges to Replace Anthropic

BlockBeats News, June 22, JFR Express reported that Zhifurui stated that Zhiku's GLM-5.2 has entered the global top three in large-scale models, marking an important milestone in China's AI development. However, the U.S. restrictions on Anthropic's top models are unlikely to bring significant revenue growth to Zhiku.

In a Chinese technology industry report released on June 17, JFR stated that GLM-5.2 ranks third in the global Model Intelligence Index, behind only Anthropic and OpenAI. This is the first time a Chinese model has entered the global top three. The report stated that GLM-5.2 excels in programming and long-term AI workflow and has become one of China's top-ranking large models.

On June 13, Zhiku released GLM-5.2 via Coding Plan and opened its API on June 17. The model adopts a 744 billion parameter MoE architecture with approximately 400 billion active parameters, supports a 1 million-token context window, and is open-sourced under the MIT license. JFR stated that in the Model Intelligence Index of Artificial Analysis, GLM-5.2 ranks third globally and first in China; in the coding and agentic metrics, it ranks fourth and second globally, and first in China, respectively. In the Arena.ai Frontend Programming Leaderboard, GLM-5.2 Max ranks second, surpassing Claude Opus 4.7 and 4.8.

The report also pointed out that the U.S. restrictions on Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 may be difficult to sustain in the long term. After Anthropic released the related models on June 9, the U.S. government, citing national security concerns, requested restrictions on foreign access, including non-U.S. employees within the U.S. Due to the short-term difficulty in distinguishing user identities, Anthropic temporarily suspended global access and enhanced identity verification.

JFR believes that the execution difficulty of such an "U.S.-only access to cutting-edge models" arrangement is high and may harm the U.S. AI ecosystem. A large number of AI researchers and engineers in the U.S. are foreign-born or non-U.S. citizens. If they are excluded from accessing cutting-edge models, it may slow down research progress and even drive some talent and usage demand overseas.

However, the report suggests that the restrictions on Fable 5 are unlikely to significantly translate into revenue for Chinese model companies. JFR's channel research shows that most users will not directly switch from Claude to GLM-5.2. The programming capabilities of GLM-5.2 are considered to be close to Claude Opus 4.7 but still lag behind Opus 4.8. Even if developers adopt Chinese open-source models, they may use them through local deployment, cloud providers, or inference platforms such as OpenRouter, rather than necessarily contributing revenue to the model developers.

The report also notes that developers usually mix models for different tasks, including code generation, debugging, and long-context tasks, instead of fully migrating to a single model. This has limited the commercialization potential of GLM-5.2 for Anthropic's potential traffic overflow.

J.P. Morgan points out that Intellispectrum still faces a shortage of high-end inference compute power, especially as long-context and agent workflows consume more compute power, which could impact enterprise demand fulfillment. The report also mentions that the Chinese large model market is intensely price competitive, with GLM-5.2 showing a performance improvement of about 26% over GLM-5.1, but the API price remains unchanged, indicating that model vendors lack significant pricing power.

Furthermore, U.S. model vendors' distillation technology and export controls also pose long-term risks. J.P. Morgan states that these measures could limit China's model catching-up capabilities and lead to a widening performance gap between Chinese and American models.

The core conclusion of the report is that GLM-5.2 has proven that Chinese models have entered the global forefront, but they have not truly "put on Anthropic's shoes" yet. Constrained by factors such as revenue conversion, compute supply, price competition, and U.S. tech restrictions, Intellispectrum will find it difficult to obtain substantial commercial gains from Anthropic access restrictions in the short term.