Open-weight AI models are catching up to the frontier. The safety gap remains.

Summary

As policymakers debate how to govern increasingly powerful AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Mythos, a Chinese open-weight model has narrowed the gap with the industry’s leaders. GLM-5.2, the open-weight AI model from China’s Z.ai, is only a few months behind OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 on cyber and bio capabilities, according to a new report from AI safety nonprofit SaferAI. But the divide between frontier capabilities and safety practices is growing. According to SaferAI’s evaluation, which the nonprofit ran via Z.ai’s public API, GLM-5.2 refused none of the offensive cyber or dual-use biology tasks it was given. By comparison, Claude Opus 4.7 “refused so consistently that SaferAI could not complete CyberGym on it at all.” (CyberGym is a benchmark that evaluates cybersecurity capabilities. OpenAI used it in the evaluation that preceded last month’s Hugging Face breach .) It’s a stark reminder of what some critics have warned for years: that open-weight AI models could put highly capable AI into the hands of potential attackers, with no way to police how they use the technology once they download the weights. With open-weight models rapidly approaching the capabilities of the world’s leading AI systems, the debate is moving from whether they can compete to how society manages risks once they are released. “The frontier of capability is not the frontier of risk, and so we do have to take into account the state of the mitigations as well to assess the risk properly,” Henry Papadatos, executive director of SaferAI, told TechCrunch. Graham Webster, who studies Chinese AI policy at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, told TechCrunch that China has robust regulations governing AI, but those rules have historically focused on politically sensitive content, misinformation, and social stability rather than catastrophic AI risks like offensive cyber capabilities and biological misuse. “U.S. AI thinkers are, in general, more concerned with this existential catastrophic [idea] than the Chinese community,” Webster said, adding that many Chinese policy researchers believe that if there’s truly going to be a novel frontier risk, American companies will likely encounter it first. “The Chinese system has confidence that they control the use of these technologies inside China,” Webster continued. “Being online in China is something you do attributed to your real name, and companies can be held accountable, users can be held accountable.” Webster mused that the same mechanism that model providers use for refusing to engage on certain political topics can potentially be tweaked to make sure models refuse to complete offensive cyber attacks or won’t deliver adverse biological engineering outcomes. Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence.