The legal name of the company is Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology Co., Ltd. (北京智谱华章科技有限公司). It is registered in China, with its headquarters located in Beijing. Founded in 2019 as a spin-off from the THUDM research group at Tsinghua University’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, the company initially operated under the brand name Zhipu AI. In 2025, it underwent a global rebranding to become Z.ai. The widely recognized community nickname "Team GLM" originates from its early academic publications and the GLM series of models it developed.
Z.ai is renowned for its systematic advancement of the GLM family of large language models, progressing from academic research to industrial-grade products. The company has earned widespread recognition for the engineering reproducibility of its models, notably achieving practical INT4 quantization for 100B+ scale models (such as GLM-130B), enabling their deployment on consumer-grade hardware. It was among the first research teams to introduce native, integrated support for tool-calling—such as web browsing, code execution, and image generation—within a single unified model architecture (GLM-4 All Tools), laying the foundation for modern AI agent scenarios. This was followed by GLM-4.5 (2025), which pioneered, among open models, automatic switching between a "thinking mode" for complex, multi-step tasks and a "non-thinking mode" for fast, routine responses. Rather than relying on traditional scaling methods such as increasing model width (hidden layer dimensionality or number of experts), Z.ai focused on depth—expanding the number of layers and attention heads—resulting in exceptional performance in generating long, structured code (particularly HTML) and handling sophisticated agent workflows. Concurrently, the multimodal variant GLM-4.5V was released, achieving state-of-the-art performance among open vision-language models (VLMs).
Today, Z.ai is recognized as one of China's key "AI tigers" and ranks as the third-largest player in China’s large language model market. Objectively, Z.ai stands out in the global AI industry due to a unique combination of three factors: scientific innovation in research, open release of weights for cutting-edge models, and a strong focus on practical use cases—particularly tool utilization and code generation.