Experts Say There’s Now an Open Source AI Model as Scary as Mythos

Well, well, well — Beijing was *totally* serious about curbing overseas access to China's top AI models, weren't they? Just last week we reported on the Ministry of Commerce's plans, and now Z.ai has gone and released GLM-5.2 — an open-weight model that boffins say is 'as scary as Mythos.' Because nothing says 'responsible state control' like handing frontier capabilities to anyone with a GPU. The farce writes itself.

Let's chew on the specifics: GLM-5.2 performs large-scale coding and vulnerability identification at levels comparable to Anthropic's Mythos. And researchers suggest Z.ai may have 'distilled' GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 — a polite way of saying they probably reverse-engineered proprietary models without consent. But hey, intellectual property is a social construct when you're racing to match the West. The irony is exquisite: regulators talk about gatekeeping while their own labs go full open-source mafia.

So what's the net effect? Another frontier-level model is now in the wild, free to be forked, fine-tuned, and weaponised by any nation-state or cybercriminal with a laptop. The cat is not just out of the bag — it's spawned a litter. And our esteemed regulators are still squabbling over definitions of 'harmful content.' Splendid work, everyone. Pint, please.