- JPMorgan Chase raised Chinese AI firm Zhipu’s price target from HK$950 to HK$1,400.
- The assessment came as Anthropic was ordered by the US government to curtail access to Mythos and Fable for foreign nationals.
- Zhipu aims to apply for a domestic listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Sci-Tech Innovation Boar
Shares of Chinese AI model maker Zhipu jumped on Monday after Wall Street banks raised their bet on the company's ability to capture global demand amid Washington's recent curbs on foreign access to advanced artificial intelligence models.
Zhipu, which trades as Knowledge Atlas Technology, surged as much as 48% before paring gains, one of its biggest increases since the company's successful initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong this year, Bloomberg reported.
It was last trading 33% higher at around HK$1,461, according to LSEG data.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. raised Zhipu's price target from HK$950 to HK$1,400. They picked it as a winner against rival MiniMax, touting Zhipu's model visibility and what the bank considers as pricing power in a hotly contested sector. They cut MiniMax's rating to neutral.
In a separate assessment, Bank of America also gave “Buy” ratings to both Zhipu and MiniMax.
The assessment came as AI giant Anthropic was ordered by the US government to curtail access to Mythos and Fable, its latest AI models, for any foreign national, including its non-US employees, due to national security concerns.
The same day, Zhipu announced that its latest open-source large model, GLM-5.2, would be released as open-source software with no usage restrictions.
Zhipu appeared to frame the announcement as a direct rejoinder to Washington's directive, CNBC reported. “Cutting-edge intelligence should not belong to only a few, nor should it be withdrawn at any time,” the company said, adding “It should be open, available, extensible and built to serve every developer.”
As US AI companies face pressure to restrict access to their frontier models, Chinese companies have focused on open distribution, particularly the “value-for-money” segment.
The first of China's “AI tigers”, Zhipu was the first startup building large language models to rival OpenAI and Anthropic that went public.
The company aims to apply for a domestic listing on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, as per Reuters.
Zhipu said the proposed issuance of A shares would represent between 2% and 8% of the company's total share capital, or between 9.1 million and 38.8 million shares.
It did not reveal the amount it intends to raise from the listing.
Zhipu plans to issue the stock within 12 months of getting the registration document from the China Securities Regulatory Commission. Once the issuance is complete, it will apply for listing and trading on the board.
