Chinese AI company Zhipu claims its new is a better bug-finder than Anthropic, OpenAI

Chinese AI company Zhipu launched GLM-5.3, claiming it outperforms Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol on the CyberGym benchmark for vulnerability discovery, and found 2,436 vulnerabilities across 269 real-world projects, including 1,097 medium-to-high severity issues. The company stated that the model's gains are largest further up the exploitation chain, and that it can reason across multiple stages of exploitation. This signals that China is not far behind in cyber capabilities, diminishing any US advantage from hosting Anthropic.

ASIA IN BRIEF Chinese company Zhipu last week launched a new AI model called GLM-5.3 that it claims has bug-finding powers that match those possessed by American models. The company’s announcement https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3 includes benchmark data that finds GLM-5.3 beats Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on the CyberGym benchmark, a test of a model’s ability to solve real-world cybersecurity challenges. “As we scaled post-training, cyber capability developed faster than we expected. GLM-5.3 is state of the art on CyberGym for vulnerability discovery, and its gains are largest further up the exploitation chain,” the company wrote, adding that the model “did not simply become better at identifying isolated flaws: it began to reason across multiple stages of exploitation, forming coherent plans for complete exploitation chains.” The company said it has worked with Chinese companies to test the model on real-world codebases, and found 2,436 vulnerabilities across 269 projects, including 1,097 medium-to-high severity issues. The findings span system kernels, operating systems, browser engines, open-source infrastructure, web applications, and network protocols. “Many had remained unnoticed for years or even decades, with the oldest dating back roughly 40 years,” the announcement states. GLM-5.3 also performed worse than western models on other security and coding benchmarks. Yet the fact that the model is a highly-capable bug finder signals that China is not far behind in terms of being able to poke holes in its rivals software and developed that capability very quickly after the debut of Anthropic’s Mythos. Any advantage the US felt it had as the home of Anthropic has therefore dissipated. Korea signals legal action against Apple, Google app store strangleholds South Korea’s Communications Commission last week found https://www.kmcc.go.kr/user.do?boardId=1113&page=A05030000&dc=K00000200&boardSeq=69320&mode=view Google and Apple had abused their app store monopolies, and promised stern sanctions will follow. In 2021, South Korea passed world-first legislation requiring app store operators to offer the option to use third-party payment schemes. Apple and Google did so, but charged a 26 percent transaction fee for doing so – meaning they earned almost as much revenue when users chose third-party payment providers as they did from their own schemes. The regulator has previously warned that it will impose the highest possible penalty available under law, which is three percent of revenue earned by non-compliant behaviour. That’s probably back-of-the-sofa money for Apple and Google. India has banned rideshare operators from offering customers the chance to specify the amount they will tip before a driver accepts a gig. Uber India introduced the feature last year https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/05/23/rideshare-companies-in-india-asking-for-tips-before-the-trip/1549311 , seemingly copying it from an Indian rideshare operator called Namma Yatri. Consumer affairs minister Pralhad Joshi criticized Uber for the practice at the time, as he saw it as a means for users to effectively jump the queue by offering drivers more money – and for rideshare platforms to improve their revenue because if tips are higher, so is the platform’s share of the gratuity. Last week, India’s Ministry of Road Transport & Highways issued a directive https://morth.gov.in/backend/documents/uploaded/1786532826 y7Cm8mbmmL.pdf PDF banning the practice. Henceforth, rideshare apps can only offer users the chance to tip at the end of a journey, and all of the tip must go to the driver. “No feature, prompt, message, add-on, payment option, or user interface element should be displayed before completion of the ride that directly or indirectly encourages, induces, or creates an impression that payment of any additional amount may improve ride confirmation, driver acceptance, driver allocation, waiting time, or quality of service,” the directive states. Indian services giants reveal data breaches Indian tech services giants TCS and HCL last week both admitted to data breaches but say customer data is safe, and only employee data is at risk. TCS published a stock exchange filing https://beta.bseindia.com/xml-data/corpfiling/AttachHis/ac9edbea-ea43-4c0a-beb8-5239bcd03ec9.pdf that opens “This is to inform you that Company has received threat-intelligence alerts alleging possible exposure of certain employee information.” The filing says TCS investigated the matter “and has not found any credible evidence of a breach of TCS systems or customer environments.” The company says leaked info is “basic employee information” and more than four years old. Note that mention of the stolen data being at least for years old, because TCS’s filing says the attacker claims to have used password spray and Multi-Factor Authentication MFA fatigue to pull off the heist. TCS says it “had strong safeguards in place against such techniques for more than two years,” perhaps suggesting the data heist occurred before the company shored up its defenses. “Based on the current review, these controls remain effective, and the Company continues to monitor the environment closely,” the filing states. HCL also used a stock exchange filing https://www.hcltech.com/sites/default/files/en/investors/3098/clarification.pdf PDF to address what it called “claims made by a hacker group of potential exposure of limited data elements relating to HCLTech employees.” The company described the stolen data as “limited and dated to a few years back,” and added its assurance that customer data is safe. HCL’s investigation is ongoing. Lenovo’s enterprise unit finally posts a big profit Lenovo last week announced its quarterly results, including a $777 million profit for its Infrastructure Solutions Group ISG – the biz based on the 2014 acquisition of IBM’s x86 server operation that has seldom produced positive financials. Even during the early years of the AI boom, ISG’s profits were modest – just a few million dollars per quarter on turnover of billions. The business unit won a record $8.5 billion of revenue, up 98 percent year-on-year. AI was a big reason for the result, as buyers sought hardware to run inferencing workloads, The company says it has a pipeline for $54 billion of AI server sales, and has become the number two x86 server vendor as measured by revenue. Overall revenue came in at $26.95 billion, up 43 percent year-on-year, and cash won by its PC-led intelligent devices group jumped 27 percent to $17.1 billion and saw its PC market share reach 24.2 percent. Lenovo reckons the strength of its supply chain helped make those outcomes possible. India to build astronaut training facility India’s Space Research Organization ISRO last week issued a tender https://www.isro.gov.in/media isro/pdf/Tenders/2026/eNIT268715 Bilingual R1 11082026.pdf for construction of an astronaut training facility. The tender mentions extensive air conditioning works, plus a swimming pool, suggesting India wants to build a large tank in which the Vyomanauts who will fly its future Gaganyaan missions can train at home, instead of traveling to Russia or elsewhere as has been the case in the past. The tender covers $2.75 million worth of work. ®