Musk and Zhipu AI's Tang Jie Debate When Chinese Models Will Catch Up With Anthropic

U.S. companies currently lead the global generative AI race, with Anthropic among the key developers of frontier models, while Chinese teams including Zhipu AI are accelerating efforts to catch up. The timing of any narrowing in model capabilities has implications for technological self-reliance, computing investment and the global AI industry landscape, making the issue a major focus for the sector.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently predicted on X that Chinese large language models would reach the level of Anthropic's Fable model in the first quarter of 2027. Zhipu AI founder and Tsinghua University professor Tang Jie promptly responded that it would “not take that long,” arguing that Chinese models would catch up faster than Musk estimated.