The Chinese startup that rattled Big Tech is back with an AI coding tool that undercuts US pricing

Cursor has a new competitor from across the Pacific.

The buzzy Chinese startup Z.ai released its AI coding tool this week. It's called ZCode, and is described as combining "the best AI agents with your existing tools so you can plan, code, review, and deploy without friction."

Z.ai called ZCode the "official development environment" for its hot new open-source model, GLM 5.2. That model rattled Silicon Valley with its high context window and performance on certain tasks, such as cybersecurity.

ZCode is a harness, one that connects to other models as well. That puts it in competition with products like Cursor and GitHub Copilot.

The comparisons to American products seem inevitable. One user commented on the Z.ai announcement post: "Damn, so you guys just cloned Codex?"

Compared to other AI coding tools, ZCode is relatively inexpensive. Its lite plan is on sale for $16.20 a month, while its max plan — 20x the lite plan — is $144 a month. For comparison, the cheapest Cursor individual plan is $20 a month, and the 20x ultra plan is $200 a month.

On social media, users continue to compare the two products. "Wake up babe, open source Claude Code just dropped," one user wrote.

Another wrote that Z.ai was "determined to catch up with its Western competitors and put them under pressure."

For their part, competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor haven't seemed to flinch. Z.ai lead Zixuan Li wrote on X that the tool stood "on the shoulders of an incredible open developer community."

"Competition and collaboration are what push all of us forward," Li wrote.