China’s new open-source model accelerates AI hacking threat

June 25, 2026 – Published on Axios

GLM-5.2 — the latest Chinese open-source model capturing Silicon Valley’s attention — is raising fresh concerns among security researchers that advanced AI hacking capabilities are becoming dramatically cheaper and more accessible.

The barrier to entry for malicious hackers eager to automate and personalize their attacks is getting lower and lower. Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, which was released last week, has agentic capabilities that rival those of Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 while costing roughly half as much to run.

Unlike Claude or ChatGPT, open-weight models like GLM-5.2 can be downloaded and modified directly, allowing users to remove safety controls, fine-tune them for specific tasks, and operate them without relying on a commercial provider.

Hackers are already talking in Russian-language forums about how easy it is to jailbreak GLM-5.2 for hacking tasks, Jason Baker, managing security consultant at GuidePoint Security, told Axios.

However, many of the AI-generated exploits and malware that researchers have seen in the wild just aren’t that good right now, Baker added.

“Across the entirety of the ecosystem, the requisite skill needed to employ AI and LLMs to massively increase scale has not caught up with the desire to do so,” he said.

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