Zhipu AI unveiled a free AI agent on Monday, joining a wave of similar launches in China’s competitive AI market. The product is an agent called AutoGLM Rumination, and like other AI agents, it is designed to make decisions and execute a range of tasks autonomously.
This comes after DeepSeek changed the AI game and left US startups scrambling to catch up earlier in the year.
Zhipu AI is bullish about its new product
According to what CEO Zhang Peng said at a lunch event in Beijing, the new AI reportedly has the ability to perform deep research as well as tasks including web searches, travel planning, and research report writing.
The agent is powered by Zhipu’s proprietary models, including its reasoning model GLM-Z1-Air and foundation model GLM-4-Air-0414. The company has said that the GLM-Z1-Air not only matches rival DeepSeek’s R1 in performance but runs up to eight times faster and requires only one-thirtieth of the computing resources.
The launch comes amid a sector-wide surge in Chinese AI product releases after DeepSeek stunned the industry on a global scale earlier this year with the release of a model it claimed operated at substantially lower costs than U.S. rivals.
It also comes weeks after rival Manus threw itself on the map with what it marketed as the world’s first general AI agent capable of making decisions and executing tasks autonomously, with considerably less prompting required compared to chatbots like ChatGPT and DeepSeek.
Beijing has been showing signs that it will support Manus’ rollout within China, echoing its response to DeepSeek’s success. State broadcaster CCTV even devoted television coverage to Manus for the first time by publishing a video on how its AI agent differs from DeepSeek’s AI chatbot.
First Manus user meetup@SF. pic.twitter.com/GjuLv849Ef
— hidecloud (@hidecloud) March 27, 2025
Beijing’s municipal government has also announced that a Chinese version of an earlier Manus product, an AI assistant called Monica, had completed the registration required for generative AI apps in China, clearing an important regulatory hurdle.
Users who want access to Manus’ tools are charged up to $199 monthly, but Zhipu’s AutoGLM Rumination will be available free of charge through the company’s official channels, including its GLM model website and mobile app.
Zhipu AI, the company that created the agent, was founded in 2019 as a spinoff from a Tsinghua University laboratory and has emerged as one of China’s leading AI startups.
The company, which developed the GLM series of models, has boasted that its latest large language model GLM4 outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4 on several benchmarks.
China’s AI industry is growing rapidly
The release of the new AI comes not long after Zhipu AI secured three consecutive rounds of government-backed funding in a single month.
The most recent investment came from the city of Chengdu, which donated 300 million yuan ($41.5 million) to the company. The funding it raised went a long way, but Zhipu AI is not the only startup to get support from the government.
DeepSeek stunned the world with its capabilities, but its success is also closely tied to government support. Its founder allegedly met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in early 2025, and government bodies nationwide have eagerly adopted its technology.
A good example of this can be observed in cities like Shenzhen, where officials have used DeepSeek to analyze surveillance footage. It has also been integrated into various public services, such as drafting legal judgments and answering government helplines.
Apart from DeepSeek, other AI startups that are benefiting from government support include Manus, 01.AI, Baichuan, Minimax, Kimi, and Ernie.
01.AI is known for its open-source approach and pioneering the MoE framework. The company also claims that its models are trained with fewer resources and have a cost-effective advantage, achieving the lowest cost level of LLM inference in the industry, 1/40 less than GPT-4’s list price.
Its founder Kai-Fu Lee, a former head of Google China, said that 01.AI has formed a joint partnership with Alibaba to create a lab focused on continuing the development of LLM technologies. The company is backed by companies like Alibaba and Sinovation Ventures.
Baidu, Alibaba, and ByteDance also all have AI divisions that have received substantial government support through policies, subsidies, and partnerships. Alibaba’s Qwen AI team partnership with Manus in March 2025 is an example of the government-encouraged collaboration that is pushing AI innovation in China.
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