Zhipu Founder Tang Jie's Internal Letter: Betting on Long-Horizon Tasks, Autonomous Agents, and Self-Evolution in the Post-Coding Era

On July 11, 2026, Tang Jie released an internal letter 'The Great Wave Is Coming', reviewing Zhipu's coding bet: market cap 10x, joining the trillion-HKD club, and MaaS ARR reaching 1.7 billion RMB (60x in a year). The flagship GLM-5.2 is now open-source, supporting million-token context, with performance matching Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. Tang noted the chat paradigm is over, and after the DeepSeek era, Zhipu bet on coding and reasoning, now entering a new phase. The company launches the 'Touch High' plan, strategically investing in four core engines over two years: long-horizon tasks (novel memory architectures), autonomous agent systems (building agent societies), fully self-training (synthetic data and self-play), and extreme safety governance. Zhipu will continue its open ecosystem; the latest GLM-5.2 uses the MIT license for anyone to download, deploy, and commercialize. For developers using Zhipu models or open-source GLM-5.2, future models will prioritize long-horizon tasks and autonomous agent capabilities, but commercialization pace may slow short-term. For teams focused on AI coding and agent infrastructure, Zhipu's shift from 'instant Q&A' to 'grand engineering' makes model memory and autonomous task decomposition key competitive edges.