India, July 16 -- For much of the past three years, the artificial intelligence (AI) race appeared deceptively straightforward. The fastest, strongest and most powerful will likely win. The summer of 2026 has changed the contours significantly, and it is no longer that simple. An AI Cold War is getting properly frosty. For every powerful AI model that US companies build, Chinese frontier labs respond with more affordable models, but with similar capabilities.

In a conversation with HT, Mehran Gul, author of 'The New Geography of Innovation', and former World Economic Forum, United Nations adviser, as well as a Fulbright Scholar at Yale, says the timing of Chinese AI Company Zhipu (also called Z.ai) releasing a powerful open weight GLM-5....