The Powerful Chinese Model Experts Warned About—and Waited for—Is Here

It’s now even easier to find—and exploit—vulnerabilities in computer systems using AI.

Last Friday, the Chinese AI company Z.ai announced a powerful open-weight model that it says is capable of automating cutting-edge coding and cybersecurity tasks almost as well as the best publicly available models from Anthropic and OpenAI .

The new model, GLM 5.3, could be a gift for companies looking to secure their systems against attacks, providing a cheaper way to scan for hidden bugs and other weaknesses. Open-weight—or free-to-download—models can be run on one’s own hardware and are often significantly less costly than closed models like Claude and GPT. Alongside the new model, Z.ai released OpenVuln , a service for scanning code repositories for vulnerabilities using GLM 5.3.

For now, the new model is in a limited release with trusted partners, but it shows how quickly open-weight models are gaining superhuman hacking skills. And that might pose problems if the model is harnessed by criminals and other bad actors.

That prospect is especially sobering following a string of startling incidents involving rogue AI agents with advanced cyber-skills. In recent weeks, OpenAI , Anthropic , and independent security researchers have revealed examples of agents escaping from testing environments and autonomously hacking into outside systems, including the research platform Hugging Face, to complete tasks.

On Monday, OpenAI president Greg Brockman warned in a blog post that the Hugging Face incident would go down as “a watershed moment for cybersecurity because it gave a peek into how the capabilities of a typical threat actor will evolve in upcoming months.”

Brockman argued that AI models are becoming so good at scouring codebases for unknown flaws and analyzing systems for misconfigurations that it’s crucial for organizations to use AI to scan their systems and identify issues before they can be exploited.

OpenAI would, of course, like companies to use its AI to do that. So far, it’s moving carefully in providing access to its most capable AI. Like Anthropic, OpenAI has made its most advanced models available to a limited number of partners prior to full release. The US government is also wrestling with the issue and now reviews frontier models as part of their releases.