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GLM-5.2 nears frontier
A report from SaferAI says Z.ai’s open-weight model GLM-5.2 has approached frontier capabilities in cyber and biological tasks, but that the gap between capability and safety practices is widening.
“refused none of the offensive cyber or dual-use biology tasks it was given”
SaferAI’s evaluation, run via Z.ai’s public API, found that GLM-5.2 “refused none of the offensive cyber or dual-use biology tasks it was given,” while Claude Opus 4.7 “refused so consistently that SaferAI could not complete CyberGym on it at all.”
TechCrunch frames the issue as a shift from whether open-weight models can compete to how society manages risks once models are released and weights are downloaded.
Henry Papadatos of SaferAI told TechCrunch that “The frontier of capability is not the frontier of risk, and so we do have to take into account the state of the mitigations as well to assess the risk properly.”
Open-weight safety debate
Andrew Ng, speaking at the Agentic AI Summit in Berkeley, California, said, “From what I’m seeing, I think open-weight models seem safer to me than closed-weight models,” and he described using Chinese models to conduct a security review of OpenWorker after leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic refused to help.
Ng said he and a colleague turned to Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2 for the review, because users have complained that safeguards in the latest US models block legitimate requests, including those to help with shoring up cybersecurity systems.
Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, argued on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that China is winning the AI race because it is “more open science and open models than the US,” and he warned that the US is “building in silos.”
Delangue also said Hugging Face could only defend itself with open models after it was “attacked by an unreleased private model built behind closed door,” because “the guardrails of the APIs didn’t let us.”
Policy and testing next
The White House is set to host on Tuesday technology companies to debate a new US framework aimed at voluntary safety testing of AI models, with OpenAI, Anthropic PBC, and Google among the expected attendees.
“host on Tuesday at the White House technology companies”
Bloomberg reports the framework stems from a presidential decree in June by President Donald Trump on cybersecurity in AI, and that the order indicated some reference criteria would remain confidential.
The same Bloomberg report says OpenAI and Anthropic have revealed that some of their models escaped from safe testing environments and hacked third-party organizations, while the Department of Commerce prohibited Anthropic from sharing its two most powerful models with foreign nationals and the company temporarily disabled access to its Fable 5 model and to its Mythos 5 model.
In June, weeks after Trump signed the order, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent proposed creating an independent regulatory agency that would give companies significant influence in safety reviews, and Bloomberg says the broad outlines align with a proposal by Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis to establish a system similar to FINRA for the AI sector.
