Surprise: Z.ai is the AI lab behind the mysterious Ox Alpha model

Z.ai confirms it is behind Ox Alpha, the mysterious open AI model topping benchmarks and leaderboards, and its weights are set to be released soon.

Open-weight AI models are catching up to the frontier. The safety gap remains. 

A new SaferAI report finds Z.ai’s open-weight GLM-5.2 approaches frontier AI capabilities while lacking key safety mitigations, renewing concerns that powerful open models could outpace governance and safeguards.