Chinese AI model developers showed a marked shift in commercialization as the National Day holiday opened, with Zhipu's GLM-5.3 going live on Amazon Bedrock under a revenue-sharing arrangement tied to model call volume.
Zhipu's 2026 interim report showed open platform and API business revenue reached 825 million yuan in the first half, up approximately 27-fold year-on-year and accounting for 86.5% of total revenue. The API business gross margin turned positive, reaching 24.6%.
GLM-5.3, which launched on September 23, features a 1-million Token context window and focuses on ultra-fast inference and programming. It ranked first in Token call volume on the OpenRouter platform for three consecutive days. Zhipu has also signed similar revenue-sharing agreements with leading cloud vendors including Alibaba Cloud's Bailian platform.
Meanwhile, domestic model providers are unlocking scale funding. Alibaba completed a placement of approximately 80 billion Hong Kong dollars, while Zhipu completed roughly 5 billion USD in equity and debt financing. Tencent has also increased overseas compute procurement. Zhipu raised its year-end ARR target from 2.4 billion USD to 3 billion USD, and MiniMax's July Token consumption reached 20 times its January level.
The shift is visible across the industry, with the front-runner models moving from competing on parameters to competing on deployment. On September 30, Google DeepMind released its next-generation flagship Gemini 4 Argon, targeting real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work and cybersecurity defense.
Domestic analysts classify "AI+" applications into three tiers of maturity. The first tier, already paying at scale, is led by programming and office productivity. Zhipu's Coding Plan call volume grew more than 23-fold from the start of the year while average API prices rose about 101%, showing customers genuinely paying for AI's coding ability. Kingsoft Office reported WPS 365 enterprise revenue up roughly 61%, growing over 60% for six consecutive quarters. In finance, Hundsun's large-model-enabled brokerage business has signed 20 cumulative clients.
The second tier has crossed the threshold of charging but is still refining its business model. In healthcare, iFlytek's imaging cloud uses AI for image quality control, compression and retrieval, approaching in-hospital reading performance, at about 5 yuan per instance. In media, China's first AI-produced long-form TV series to air on satellite, "Journey to the West: The Demons Return," premiered on Hunan Satellite TV and Mango TV, produced at less than one-tenth the cost of comparable high-quality animation with a production cycle cut roughly 70%. But AI lowers production cost, not customer acquisition cost — and with content supply surging, user attention is the genuinely scarce resource, so the project still depends on traffic buying, platform revenue sharing and advertising.
The third tier remains in pilot or concept demonstration: education, where iFlytek's Spark automatic grading machine saw signed sales up 14-fold in the first half with coverage of more than 5,000 schools nationwide; manufacturing, where AI adoption among above-scale manufacturers exceeds 30% but is concentrated in single points such as quality inspection and vision; and robotics, where factory inspection and warehousing logistics have real demand, but generalization capability remains a bottleneck.
