China’s Zhipu AI launched a free AI agent, escalating the local tech competition.

BEIJING (Reuters) — Zhipu AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence firm, released a free AI agent on Monday, following a slew of similar releases in China’s increasingly competitive AI sector.

At a lunch event in Beijing, CEO Zhang Peng said that the tool, named AutoGLM Rumination, can undertake deep research as well as online searches, vacation planning, and research report authoring.

The agent is driven by Zhipu’s proprietary models, which include the reasoning model GLM-Z1-Air and the foundation model GLM-4-Air-0414. According to the business, GLM-Z1-Air equals rival DeepSeek’s R1 in performance while operating up to eight times quicker and using just one-thirtieth of the computational resources.

AI agents are systems that can make choices and perform a variety of activities autonomously.

The launch follows a boom in Chinese AI product releases after DeepSeek shocked the market earlier this year with a model that it claimed worked at far cheaper prices than US competitors.

It also comes weeks after competitor Manus drew attention with what it billed as the world’s first generic AI agent.

While Manus costs up to $199 per month, Zhipu’s AutoGLM Rumination will be offered for free via the company’s official channels, which include its GLM model website and mobile app.

Zhipu AI, created in 2019 as a spinoff from a Tsinghua University lab, has emerged as one of China’s most prominent AI firms.

The business, which created the GLM series of models, says that its most recent big language model, GLM4, surpasses OpenAI’s GPT-4 on many benchmarks.

The business made news earlier this month for receiving three rounds of government investment in a single month. The city of Chengdu made the most recent investment, injecting 300 million yuan ($41.5 million) into the firm.