Multiple independent sources told 36Kr that Z.ai’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached USD 1 billion in July.
Over the past year, coding and video generation models have emerged as two of the artificial intelligence sector’s strongest revenue drivers.
Outside China, Anthropic’s Claude Code reached USD 1 billion in ARR just six months after its launch. The product’s growth also helped lift Anthropic’s valuation to nearly USD 1 trillion in May, surpassing OpenAI.
Investors, however, had long questioned whether Chinese foundation model companies could replicate Anthropic’s financial success.
Anthropic benefits from operating in North America, where businesses are more willing to pay for software and the subscription ecosystem is more mature. Its valuation is also roughly an order of magnitude above Z.ai’s latest market capitalization, giving it access to a deeper pool of capital for the computing capacity and other resources needed to train models. Chinese developers have yet to match that advantage.
But an investor told 36Kr that Z.ai reached the milestone much sooner than expected. The company had not been projected to reach an ARR of USD 1.0–1.5 billion until the end of 2026, the investor said.
A direct comparison illustrates the pace of its growth. According to Anthropic’s disclosures and Z.ai’s financial reports, Anthropic took 15 months to increase its ARR from USD 100 million to USD 1 billion. Z.ai took five months.
A person familiar with the matter said Z.ai’s ARR grew 15-fold from January to July this year.
Z.ai was among the first Chinese artificial intelligence model developers to focus heavily on coding as a use case. In early 2025, it began concentrating its resources on improving its models’ coding capabilities. Founder Jie Tang has described coding and reasoning as central to Z.ai’s strategy, arguing that both capabilities can advance alongside AI agents and support their development.
Z.ai subsequently released a series of flagship models, averaging about one every two months. Their coding performance placed them among the leading models globally.
The company released its latest model, GLM-5.2, last month. The open-source model reportedly matched or outperformed Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on several benchmarks.
Z.ai has said the commercial value of foundation models depends on the relationship between model intelligence and token consumption. The company argues that usage will continue to grow as long as a model maintains a capability lead.
Z.ai’s financial results showed that it raised GLM API prices by a cumulative 83% in the first quarter. Its international subscription prices approached those of Claude Code, while usage increased by about 400%.
As token consumption becomes an increasingly important measure of model monetization, coding and video generation models represent two distinct business models. Coding models power productivity tools sold directly to businesses and developers, while video-generation models are increasingly being integrated into industrial-scale content production workflows.
Revenue growth suggests that demand for coding models is becoming more established. A similar pattern is emerging in video generation. Seedance 2.0 is reportedly generating nearly RMB 1 billion (USD 147.5 million) in monthly revenue. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, forecasts that Kling AI’s ARR could reach USD 1 billion by the end of the year.
As the commercial opportunity becomes clearer, competition is intensifying.
MiniMax released M3 in June, with a focus on strengthening its coding and agent capabilities. On July 16, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, an open-source model with 2.8 trillion parameters. Its overall intelligence performance reportedly trails only Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.
Competition is also intensifying outside China. By releasing GPT-5.6 and integrating ChatGPT with Codex, OpenAI is seeking to regain ground in AI coding.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Zhou Xinyu for 36Kr.
Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.78 = USD 1 based on estimates as of July 17, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are presented for ease of reference and may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.