Chinese AI model emerges as fresh threat to Anthropic ahead of planned float
Published: 10:05 26 Jun 2026 EDT
Jefferies' Christopher Wood flags a "DeepSeek moment" as cheaper Chinese models gain ground on Western incumbents
The launch of a low-cost Chinese artificial intelligence model has been described by Jefferies strategist Christopher Wood as another "DeepSeek moment" for the technology sector.
Wood, author of the bank's widely read Greed & fear note, said the GLM-5.2 model from Hong Kong-listed Z.ai, formerly Zhipu AI, was almost a match for Anthropic in the corporate market at a quarter of the cost per token.
The challenge lands as Anthropic, the US AI developer behind the Claude chatbot, prepares for a planned stock market listing.
Anthropic's annualised run-rate revenue has surged from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $47 billion in May, growth Wood expects to slow as companies push back against heavy token consumption.
He argued the threat was greater still for rival OpenAI (Unlisted:OPAI), which has already lost ground to Anthropic among corporate customers and is also weighing a listing.
Cheaper Chinese models are already gaining share, with the top Chinese systems processing 21.37 trillion tokens on the OpenRouter aggregator platform in the week to 21 June, up from 4.37 trillion in late April, against 5.76 trillion for the leading US models.
Wood sees the shift reinforcing a view that large language models will become commoditised, while giving companies an incentive to move smaller models onto their own servers to protect data.
Despite the competitive pressure on the model developers, Wood remains positive on the "picks and shovels" suppliers that have driven AI-related stock gains, citing the Jevons paradox, under which cheaper tokens spur greater overall demand for computing power and memory chips.
He named memory makers as the principal beneficiaries, arguing SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (ADR) (LSE:BC94) and Micron Technology Inc (NASDAQ:MU) should now be valued on earnings rather than book value, and still looked cheap on that measure.
Wood said he was raising exposure to technology hardware across the Greed & fear portfolios, adding Hynix and Kioxia to the global long-only portfolio while removing Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Alibaba.
The main risk to the wider trade, he said, was a sudden realisation among investors that hyperscalers and the leading AI developers cannot earn an adequate return on their spending, a fear compounded by circular financing arrangements such as Nvidia funding OpenAI's chip purchases.
For now, Wood said, such concerns remained theoretical, with no sign yet of the AI capital spending race slowing.
Other stocks that are of interest:
Oracle Corp (NYSE:ORCL, XETRA:ORC)
Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META, XETRA:FB2A, SIX:FB)
