A Chinese AI coding agent is making unexpected inroads on American turf. Zhipu AI's GLM 4.7 model is gaining enough traction among US developers that the company had to start limiting access due to overwhelming demand, according to a CNBC investigation. The development marks a potential DeepSeek-like breakout moment for Chinese AI tools in the US market, challenging assumptions about American dominance in AI coding assistants.
There's a quiet shift happening in the developer tools market that nobody saw coming. Zhipu AI, a Chinese startup that went public in Hong Kong last year, is breaking through the longstanding bias American developers have held against Chinese AI models. And it's doing it with a coding agent that's fast enough to make people reconsider everything they thought they knew about the US-China AI race.
The company's GLM 4.7 model started making waves after Zhipu posted on WeChat that demand had gotten so intense they'd need to start limiting access. That's the kind of problem most startups dream about, but what caught CNBC's attention wasn't just the buzz - it was where that buzz was coming from. "The user base of Zhipu GLM Coding Plan is primarily concentrated in the United States and China," the company's investor relations team confirmed, a remarkable admission considering how rare it is for Chinese AI tools to gain genuine traction in America.
Just last week, developers were celebrating Replit and Claude Code as the frontier of AI coding agents, tools that could spin up functional apps in minutes and contributed to a 60% surge in new app releases according to recent data. But when CNBC put Zhipu head-to-head against these American darlings, the results complicated the narrative that US companies maintain a comfortable six-month lead - a timeline Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis recently suggested.
The testing revealed something unexpected. Asked to build a tracker for China's biggest public companies, Zhipu whipped up a working app faster than its American counterparts. The catch? The results were less polished, suggesting speed doesn't always equal refinement. But in a market where developers increasingly value rapid prototyping and iteration, that tradeoff might not matter as much as Silicon Valley hopes.
