On June 12th, the U.S. Commerce Department issued an export-control directive barring Anthropic from supplying Fable 5 or Mythos 5 to any foreign national, forcing the company to disable both models worldwide. The next day, Beijing-based Z.ai, formerly Zhipu AI, began rolling out GLM-5.2, an open-weight model it released under a permissive MIT license. The new model was purportedly trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips with no Nvidia hardware.

Within a week, GLM-5.2 had climbed to the top of the openly available leaderboards, Z.ai's market value had passed HK$1 trillion (about US$128 billion), and the most capable model many users outside the U.S. could legally access was a free download from a company that sits on Washington's trade blacklist.