Zhipu ARR breaks 1 billion USD, achieving 15 times explosive growth in 6 months

According to "Intelligent Emergence," multiple independent sources reported that by July 2026, China's leading large model company, Zhipu, had achieved an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $1 billion. Insiders revealed that between January and July 2026, Zhipu's ARR surged 15 times in just six months. The growth from $100 million ARR to $1 billion took Zhipu only 5 months, surpassing the 15 months it took the American AI lab Anthropic to reach a similar stage. As of the time of publication, Zhipu has not responded to the aforementioned financial data.

The rapid rise in Zhipu's revenue is primarily attributed to its concentrated investment in coding and reasoning capabilities. Financial reports show that in the first quarter of this year, even though the API call price for GLM increased by approximately 83%, its overseas subscription prices approached those of Anthropic's Claude Code, yet its total call volume still grew by about 400% against the trend. In June of this year, Zhipu launched its latest open-source large model, GLM-5.2, which has matched or even surpassed mainstream cutting-edge models on several core metrics.

Currently, AI coding and video generation have become the fastest commercialized and most revenue-generating tracks for large models globally. As the demand in the coding market becomes more certain, industry competition is intensifying. Domestically, MiniMax released the M3, which focuses on enhancing coding capabilities, in June, while the Dark Side of the Moon launched the K3 open-source model with 2.8 trillion parameters on July 16; internationally, with OpenAI merging ChatGPT and CodeX, it has also shown a momentum to catch up with Anthropic in the coding field, and the global battle for AI productivity tools continues to escalate.