ByteDance, Zhipu Jolt China’s AI Race Ahead of New Year

ByteDance Ltd. and Zhipu have joined a flurry of Chinese companies releasing major AI model upgrades, raising the stakes in an intensifying battle for tech dominance and users ahead of the Lunar New Year.

Zhipu on Thursday released the latest iteration of its large language model, GLM-5, surpassing a rival offering from Moonshot AI unveiled just weeks ago to claim the top spot among open-source models on benchmarking site Artificial Analysis. The company hiked the price of its GLM Coding Plan — similar to Anthropic PBC’s Claude Code, which is unavailable in China — by 30% this week to capitalize on surging demand. Its shares rose as much as 34% in Hong Kong on Thursday.

TikTok owner ByteDance has also won high praise for the performance of its new video model, Seedance 2.0, which is still in testing. The competitor to OpenAI’s Sora has yielded a number of impressive demonstrations that have been widely shared online.

The back-to-back launches this week accelerated an arms race in China’s AI industry, where startups and tech giants are rushing out products to preempt an expected release from DeepSeek. The industry anticipates the Hangzhou-based research lab to unveil its next-generation architecture during the February holiday in China, a move likely to draw global attention. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s flagship model, Qwen-3.5, is also expected to debut in the coming weeks.

The model rollouts — coupled with a renewed subsidy war for AI chatbot users — come as Chinese tech players move to seize a weeklong holiday historically critical for user growth in consumer internet apps. During the 2014 Lunar New Year, Tencent Holdings Ltd. jumpstarted its payment business through a red-packet giveaway feature on WeChat, a feat China’s Big Tech firms now aim to replicate with their AI services.

“It is a Spring Festival for Chinese models before the real Spring Festival for Chinese people,” said Xiadong Bao, fund manager at Edmond de Rothschild Asset Management. “The performance gap between Chinese LLMs and the US ones is shrinking rapidly.”

Zhipu’s GLM-5 is designed to tackle complex coding and agentic tasks and has been measured directly against Anthropic’s Claude Opus series. The model, with more than double the number of parameters of its predecessor, was first launched in stealth mode over the weekend and received positive early feedback from developers. It’s part of the Beijing-based outfit’s plan to transition from building customized AI solutions for domestic business clients to selling its technology to global users. 

Markets have this month shown elevated sensitivity to new artificial intelligence debuts that threaten established businesses, hitting everything from legal and compliance software to video games. Zhipu itself, listed at the start of this year, jumped this week after JPMorgan initiated coverage and GLM-5’s initial rollout.

ByteDance is the main sponsor of the Chinese state broadcaster’s popular New Year gala, and the company is distributing gifts including robots and smartwatches to users of its Doubao chatbot. Some analysts have questioned if the outsize spending is justified in an already costly battle.

“Qwen , Doubao , Ernie Bot and Yuanbao are all spending a lot of money to buy traffic,” said Felix Wang, tech sector head at Hedgeye Risk Management. “I know they’re all trying to build habit among the users, but this will hurt margins, again.”

With assistance from Mark Anderson.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.