The Zhitong Finance App learned that after GLM-5.2, Zhi Spectrum (02513) handed over another brilliant questionnaire. According to the “Emerging Intelligence” report, as of July 2026, Smart Spectrum's ARR (annual recurring revenue) had reached 1 billion US dollars. At this point, Zhipu became the first major local model manufacturer in China to stand at this commercial milestone. It fulfilled the market's previous performance expectations of $10-15 billion ARR at the end of the year half a year ahead of schedule, and rewrote the market's perception of the pace of commercialization of big models at an astonishing rate of growth.
Compared to the commercialization process of Anthropic, a global benchmark company, Zhi Spectrum's growth rate is extremely groundbreaking. According to Anthropic's official data and Smart Spectrum's financial data, ARR grew from 100 million US dollars to 1 billion US dollars. Anthropic used 15 months, and Smart Spectrum only used 5 months. People familiar with the matter revealed that between January and July 2026, Smart Spectrum's ARR increased 15 times.
Looking at the horizontal dimension of the industry, Zhipu's current ARR volume of 1 billion US dollars is equivalent to the three leading domestic model companies, DeepSeek, Kimi, and MiniMax, which has shattered the market's long-standing question that “it is difficult for domestic manufacturers to replicate the Anthropic commercialization myth.” Prior to that, the industry generally believed that the mature North American enterprise subscription ecosystem and sufficient computing power capital reserves were Anthropic's unique advantages, and that it was difficult for local model makers to replicate its revenue explosion path, but Smart Spectrum's report card overturned this judgment.
The core of this explosive growth of intelligent spectrum stems from the two core competency routes of coding and reasoning, which have been firmly betting since the beginning of 2025. Smart Spectrum is one of the earliest model manufacturers to bet on the coding route in China. Tang Jie, the founder of the company, once proposed that coding and reasoning are core model capabilities that can collaborate deeply with intelligent agents and continuously release commercial value.
Under this strategic direction, Zhi Spectrum maintained an iterative pace of about two monthly editions and continued to launch the GLM series flagship model with the highest coding capability in the world. On June 17, GLM-5.2, the company's fully open next-generation flagship model, reached a level of efficiency that surpassed the top overseas models, ranked first in the world in Code Arena blind tests, and topped the list of open source models in the Artificial Analysis comprehensive list.
Smart Spectrum broke through the ARR of 1 billion US dollars, marking that the local AI model has officially entered a new stage of large-scale and stable profit. It has verified that the domestic market also has the soil to nurture high-revenue and high-volume model enterprises. Domestic AI can completely open up an independent and high-growth commercialization path.
At present, the development logic of the AI industry has reached a watershed moment. Industry competition is gradually shifting from simple technology competition to real and sustainable commercial value for enterprises. It is foreseeable that as the AI industry fully enters the commercialization implementation cycle, ARR will gradually become one of the key criteria for judging the long-term core competitiveness of large model companies.