The Real Threat to AI Isn't a Bubble. It's Free.
On June 12th the US Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to disable its two most powerful models (Fable 5 and Mythos 5) for all foreign nationals. The next day Z.AI released GLM-5.2 under an MIT license with no regional restrictions, available for anyone to download, modify, and run locally without asking permission.
OpenAI is valued at $852B and Anthropic at $965B. Together they represent nearly $2T in private market valuation built on a single assumption: frontier AI commands premium pricing permanently. GLM-5.2 performs at one-sixth the cost of Western equivalents on the benchmarks that matter to enterprise buyers. It cannot be geofenced or revoked, and for users with the hardware to run it locally, it costs nothing beyond the electricity to power it.
The Companies Behind the Valuations
Before the open-source argument, we need to break down who owns what. Microsoft owns ~27% of OpenAI. Google committed $43B to Anthropic and owns 14% (capped at 15%). Amazon owns an estimated mid-teens percentage of Anthropic, with up to $33B committed. Nvidia committed $30B to OpenAI and $10B to Anthropic before CEO Jensen Huang confirmed in March 2026 that these would be the company's final direct investments in major AI labs. Salesforce holds ~$5B in Anthropic, owning roughly 0.5%. The precise stakes become public when Anthropic's S-1 is unsealed ahead of its expected October IPO, this will be the first time the full ownership structure is disclosed.
In Q1 2026 Alphabet (Google's parent company) reported record profits of $62.6B, ~$28.7B of that (almost half) came from marking up the value of its Anthropic stake as Anthropic's funding round price rose. Amazon's Q1 net income included $16.8B in pre-tax Anthropic gains, which were more than half of their pre-tax income for the quarter.
These are paper profits and only exist because the most recent Anthropic funding round was priced higher than the previous one. They are not cash or revenue; they depend entirely on the assumption that AI premium pricing holds, and this rests on there being no free alternative.
But now there are free alternatives.
What GLM-5.2 Is
Z.AI is the brand of Zhipu AI, a Beijing-based AI lab founded in 2019 with backing from Tencent, Alibaba, and the Chinese government.
GLM-5.2 was released on June 16th. 753B total parameters using a mixture-of-experts architecture, meaning ~40B parameters activate per token, making it far more efficient than a dense 753B model, though still requiring professional-grade hardware to run locally. 1M token context window. MIT license with explicit language guaranteeing "no regional limits" and "technical access without borders."