While Anthropic has been forced to shut down its latest general-use models for over two weeks after it emerged that the company's de-tuned public-facing Fable 5 model could be 'jailbroken' into its unrestricted form (Mythos 5) to perform tasks that pose security risks, a Chinese AI company backed by Alibaba and Tencent has released a model that matches the performance of Mythos in some cybersecurity scenarios.
The company, Zhipu AI - also known as Z.ai, can match the latest US models when it comes to finding security bugs - though it still lags at other tasks, according to the Wall Street Journal.
What's more, Zhipu's GLM-5.2 is an open-weight model, meaning it can be downloaded and run on hardware by anyone and can be modified and used without supervision - which hackers are undoubtedly loving.
As we noted last week for our premium subscribers, this is how Goldman's Delta One head, Rich Privorotsky framed the latest Chinese shock to the system from open-weight models:
It's not just some of Wall Street's top thinkers who were immediately drawn to the stats of the latest Chinese offering: various industry insiders were in shock.
Artificial Analysis’ new knowledge work benchmark rated it higher than GPT 5.5
"This kind of powerful weapon that can alter the landscape of cyberwarfare can’t remain solely in American hands," Zhou Hongyi - CEO of Chinese cybersecurity company 360 Security Technology, speaking at a cybersecurity conference in Beijing. His company has released a new bug-finding tool called Tulongfeng - which it claims is comparable to Mythos when it comes to finding bugs.
Zhou Hongyi, chief executive of 360 Security Wu Hao/EPA/Shutterstock
So while the Trump administration restored some access to Mythos 5, IT departments across America are now at a disadvantage when it comes to using something this powerful to find and patch their own vulnerabilities.
"Banning Fable while selling chips China needs to develop its own version is a gift to China," said Saif Khan - a distinguished technology fellow at the Institute for Progress think tank who focused on export restrictions under the Biden administration. Kahn says that the US needs to maximize the use of Mythos and similar models to harden cyber defenses while it can.
Meanwhile - OpenAI on Friday said it will now limit access to its latest model - GPT 5.6, after Trump administration officials raised security concerns. The company warned that the government's current case-by-case evaluation process isn't a good long-term solution, but they're adhering to it following a recent executive order focused on security and model oversight.
In short, the Trump administration is driving people to use open-weight Chinese models, while hobbling the US AI industry.


