Goldman Sachs picks its favorite Chinese AI models

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Goldman Sachs has three preferred Chinese artificial intelligence models, only one of which is publicly traded. The investment bank on Friday initiated coverage on Hong Kong-listed Zhipu , also known as Knowledge Atlas, with a price target of 1,880 Hong Kong dollars ($239.83). That's nearly 15% upside from where the stock closed that day. The company has skyrocketed since its listing in Hong Kong in January. The company gained further attention in recent weeks as its open-sourced GLM-5.2 model is considered to rival Anthropic's Fable 5 on several metrics. "With its latest GLM5.2 model reaching near-frontier performance that has seen significant ramp-up in domestic enterprise & global SME adoption, we believe its extensive usage by coders will enable Zhipu to sustain high frequency of further model upgrades, and thereby solidify its leading position in enterprise/coding in China," the analysts said. While they initiated coverage on the stock with a neutral rating, their two other preferred Chinese AI model companies are Deepseek and ByteDance, both of which are privately held, according to a separate Goldman report released Friday. The analysts assessed the models based on factors such as time to market, arena score , valuation and pricing. The research also included AI video generation capabilities, for which ByteDance was best. Zhipu's GLM and DeepSeek's models generally ranked better than those from Alibaba , Tencent and Minimax , especially in time to market and Arena score, the Goldman report said. In Hong Kong markets over the last 60 trading days, Zhipu shares have surged 70%, while Minimax has plunged by more than 70%. Alibaba has tumbled nearly 10%, while Tencent is down by about 5%. "China's AI open-source/open-weight models are reaching a critical point of intelligence performance vs. global proprietary models," the analysts said. "Agentic AI is driving explosive demand for these value-for-money models at the lower-end. Access to computing will be a swing factor, where US/China regulations, balance sheet and inference efficiency are key," the analysts said. — CNBC's Michael Bloom contributed to this report.