The CEO and founder of one of China's leading AI startups has warned that a rival Chinese Fable 5-class AI model is closer than even Elon Musk thinks, in a recent X interaction. In a post on his own platform, Musk stated that China's attempt at an AI model to rival Anthropic's new Fable 5 offering will arrive in "Probably Q1," to which Jie Tang replied, "won't take that long."
won’t take that longJune 18, 2026
Jie Tang might be a relative unknown in the Western world, but he’s the founder of Z.ai, formerly known as Zhipu AI, and is one of the leading AI startups in China, based in Beijing. It released its latest AI model, GLM-5.2, on June 16, 2026, and the company’s benchmarks show that it has almost the same performance as Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 to 4.8, which launched in April and May of this year, respectively. It has also consistently outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro.
Anthropic launched its latest, most powerful public model, Fable 5, last June 10, which itself is a nerfed version of the Mythos 5 that was previewed to select entities in early April. However, three days after the general public could start enjoying Fable 5, the U.S. government put an export control directive on the model and barred all foreign nationals, including Anthropic’s own employees, from accessing it. Since the company determined that it cannot guarantee total compliance with the order, it decided to pull both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 from across the globe.
If Z.ai is indeed working on a more powerful frontier AI model that could compare against or even outperform Fable 5, users who want the latest, cutting-edge models might just switch over to the Chinese AI provider once it goes online. This does not mean that the U.S. would automatically be disadvantaged, though, as it still has Mythos and Fable. The U.S. government claimed that it only put the export control Fable 5 after Amazon allegedly discovered that the Anthropic model’s guardrails could be broken, and that the company refused to address it before going live. In its defense, the AI startup claims that the so-called jailbreak is minor and is replicable in other models like GPT-5.5. Washington claims that once the issue has been resolved through a patch, it will lift the restrictions and allow foreign users to access Fable 5 again.
Both China and the U.S. are in a race to get the most advanced AI model possible. The U.S. has put major roadblocks to block China’s progress, including the imposition of export controls on the latest AI chips, tools needed to make the latest semiconductors, and even the software needed to design them. Despite that, Chinese firms find ways to achieve breakthroughs, with one of the biggest developments so far being the arrival of DeepSeek in late 2024. It seems that Jie Tang wants to take the Chinese crown away from DeepSeek by claiming that Z.ai could come out with a model that could match the United States’ best in the coming months.
