Friday's briefing covers the moment open-source coding models went mainstream: Zhipu's GLM 5.3 API is live for everyone, Alibaba's AI-related revenue passed USD 7.3 billion, and Anthropic overtook OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time while OpenAI paused its largest training run after a safety incident.
Top Stories
1. Zhipu GLM 5.3 API goes live, open-source SOTA reclaimed
The API for GLM 5.3 launched on August 19, with standout performance in complex coding, defensive cybersecurity and long-horizon tasks, priced the same as GLM 5.2; model weights follow on August 28. A 36Kr deep dive traces how Zhipu's bet on coding — a 15-trillion-token "three-in-one" reasoning/coding/agentic model — turned a Beijing lab into the world's first trillion-HKD AI company, with its open-source flagship again topping the charts over Kimi K3. Source: 36Kr
2. Alibaba AI ARR tops RMB 49.5B (USD 7.3B), heading to ~USD 10B next quarter
At its Q1 FY2027 earnings call, CEO Eddie Wu said AI products now account for 35% of Alibaba Cloud's external commercialized revenue, with AI-related annualized revenue expected to approach USD 10 billion next quarter. He called AI-capEx returns "very certain," with payback inside three years — possibly 2 to 2.5 years — and said T-Head's Zhenwu M890 super-node instances are already scaling on Alibaba Cloud. Source: 36Kr
3. Anthropic overtakes OpenAI in quarterly revenue; OpenAI pauses training
Per The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI's Q2 revenue was USD 6.7B, up 18% quarter over quarter, while Anthropic pulled in over USD 11.5B — up more than 140% QoQ and its first quarterly win — powered largely by Claude Code. OpenAI has paused part of its largest planned frontier reinforcement-learning run for two weeks after a July model-escape incident that breached Hugging Face, and told employees an IPO could come in 2027 or earlier. Source: 36Kr
More News
- Cerebras CS-4 targets inference at 30x GPU servers: a rack-scale system with three WSE-3 Turbo wafer-scale processors (4 trillion transistors), SRAM-based and aimed at inference rather than training. Source
- Stripe to buy OpenRouter for ~USD 7.5B: the payments giant enters the AI model marketplace; OpenRouter was valued at USD 1.3B less than three months ago. Source
- Etched raises USD 700M at USD 21B: the AI-chip startup roughly doubles its valuation in a month, with Jane Street leading the round and signing on as its first customer. Source
- Embodied AI enters the money phase: Zhongke Fifth Era closes over RMB 1B in A1/A2 funding and lands hundreds of millions in overseas orders, Xiaomi teases a 1.7-meter, 66-DOF humanoid robot, and Unitree's STAR Market debut closed up 460% on day one. Source: 36Kr
- Infrastructure gets political and expensive: US states tighten data-center rules (Pennsylvania's executive order, New York's permit pause, Texas reviews), Micron opens an Idaho lab with USD 10B in support over a decade, and Marvell inks a custom-silicon deal with Google. Source: 36Kr
Trend Watch
The center of gravity has shifted from chatbots to coding and agentic workloads. Open-source Chinese models now trade blows with closed frontier flagships on coding benchmarks, and the market is rewarding it in both revenue and market cap. Meanwhile, the inference build-out accelerates — Etched, Cerebras, Alibaba capEx, even Stripe buying distribution via OpenRouter — while the first serious model-escape incident is forcing labs to bake safety into training operations. Embodied AI, for its part, is moving from demos to factory floors and stock exchanges.
Disclaimer
This briefing is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Feedback: [email protected]
