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BEIJING, April 15 (Reuters) - Chinese artificial intelligence startup Zhipu AI has initiated preliminary steps toward an initial public offering, aiming to become the first of China's emerging AI companies to go public.

Founded in 2019 as a Tsinghua University spinoff, Zhipu AI has emerged among China's front-runners in the artificial intelligence race, alongside AI-focused startups Moonshot AI, Minimax, 01.AI, Baichuan, and StepFun, while also competing with tech giants such as ByteDance and Alibaba(9988.HK), opens new tab in the sector.

The company attracted attention earlier this year after securing three rounds of state-backed funding within weeks. Its latest financing included a 300 million yuan ($41.5 million) investment from the Chengdu municipal government.

Zhipu AI, developer of the GLM series of language models, claims its flagship GLM4 model surpasses OpenAI's GPT-4 on several performance benchmarks.

The company announced Tuesday it would open-source its GLM series models, namely the 32B and 9B versions. Its GLM-Z1-32B-0414 model matches the performance of rival product DeepSeek-R1 at one-thirtieth of the operational cost, according to a company statement.

Zhipu AI is controlled by Tang Jie and Liu Debing, with Tang directly holding a 7.4% equity stake in the company, according to the regulatory filing.

China International Capital Corporation will act as the IPO sponsor, according to a filing posted on the China Securities Regulatory Commission website. As sponsor, CICC will conduct preliminary due diligence on Zhipu's operations and financials.

The sponsorship arrangement is a mandatory prerequisite in China's IPO process, typically lasting several months during which sponsors assess the company's eligibility for public listing.

François Bayrou urges clean-up of public finances but faces a vote of no confidence if opposition object to budget cuts

France must break its decades-long habit of spending beyond its means, including by working more and improving the efficiency of public services, said Prime Minister François Bayrou.

“It’s a vicious circle, a dangerous trap, potentially irreversible, that must be identified and whose full implications we must share with the French people,” Bayrou said of France’s chronic deficits during a press conference on Tuesday. “This risk is politically untenable. But more profoundly, it is morally unacceptable.”

The centrist prime minister, allied with President Emmanuel Macron, has made cleaning up France’s degraded public finances a priority, but he risks being toppled by the opposition if they are angered by the pain stemming from budget cuts.

Gridlock has worsened since Macron called snap elections last summer, only to lose them and face a National Assembly fractured into three similar-sized blocs.

Since Macron’s centrists and their allies, including Bayrou’s party, no longer have a majority in parliament, they will have to use a constitutional clause to override lawmakers to pass the 2026 budget. This then opens them up to a no-confidence vote. Such a move led to the ousting of Bayrou’s predecessor Michel Barnier last year.

France’s interest costs this year will reach about €62bn, roughly equal to annual combined spending on defence and education, excluding pensions, and those costs would climb to around €100bn by 2029 if nothing were done. If France were to be downgraded by rating agencies or investors became less willing to buy its government bonds, borrowing costs could rise further, Bayrou said.

On Sunday, finance minister Eric Lombard warned that an additional fiscal package of €40bn would be needed for 2026 for France to reach its goal of cutting the budget deficit to 4.6 per cent of national output from 5.4 per cent at the end of 2024. The 2025 budget included tax rises and spending cuts of €50bn.

The effort will be made harder since French growth is slowing and unemployment is rising. The Bank of France has lowered its annual growth target for this year to 0.7 per cent from 0.9 per cent, given a stagnant economy in Europe and the risk of a global trade war triggered by Donald Trump.

The government said that it planned to propose cuts to social spending, such as ending tax breaks to pensioners and healthcare and reducing the spiralling costs of medical leave.

Social spending accounts for half of all government spending, and is the hardest to cut since it angers voters. Other measures will include a new mechanism to prevent rich people from avoiding tax, although it will not restore the wealth tax that was in effect until 2017. A temporary tax on big companies in effect this year is set to be scrapped.

“If French people say no to these actions, then we will be heading to a crisis,” said Bayrou. If no reforms were enacted, then there would be little margin to spend on priorities such as defence spending and fighting climate change.

On defence in particular, Macron has called for higher spending in the coming years to face security challenges from Russia and the possible reduction of US military support for Europe. But Bayrou on Tuesday only committed to sticking to already planned rises through 2030. 

The government is working on the 2026 budget now, and plans to have a draft proposal by mid-July, several months earlier than usual.

Whether Bayrou can survive a no-confidence vote on the budget in the autumn will depend on the position of the Socialist party, a key swing voting bloc in the assembly, as well as that of the far right led by Marine Le Pen.

Sebastien Chenu, a lawmaker in the far-right Rassemblement National party, told Europe 1/CNews on Monday that the group could vote to topple the government if its budget weighed too heavily on working people.

“Constructing a budget that asks French people to tighten their belts . . . exposes them to a no-confidence motion from us,” Chenu said.

France remains far above the 3 per cent of GDP deficit ceiling set by the EU, and is among the worst performers in the region. It is aiming to get back to 3 per cent of GDP by 2029. But Brussels has put it on a watchlist of countries with excessive deficits and it will be monitoring closely to see whether France delivers.

The firm is joining with Vanguard and Wellington to offer portfolios with public and private assets

Blackstone is teaming up with two big traditional asset managers to develop investment products, a move that could extend its reach into the portfolios of everyday investors.

The private-markets giant has formed an alliance with Vanguard and Wellington Management, with the goal of offering individuals access to multiasset portfolios, with private and public assets, that have otherwise only been available to institutional investors, the companies said.

The three firms declined to share specifics of their planned offerings, but said they plan to announce them in the coming months.

The tie-up represents Wall Street’s latest push to get investments such as private equity and private credit into the hands of individuals. While the trio’s initial products will be sold via financial advisers, the collaboration is expected to be long-term and could evolve.

The partnership could give Blackstone a path to offer private-markets assets for target-date funds in 401(k)s, which many in the industry have long viewed as a holy grail.

Vanguard is a major player in that market with $2.5 trillion in retirement assets as of the end of 2024.

Private-market funds tend to lock up investor money for longer periods and typically come with higher fees than mutual funds or exchange-traded funds.

The biggest private-markets asset managers have been aggressively courting moderately wealthy individuals, with growth from pensions, endowments and other institutional investors slowing. Firms are designing products for individual investors that they market to financial advisers.

Some have announced partnerships with other managers to try to make it easier for individual investors to access private markets. KKR and Capital Group are working together on a series of funds that invest in both public and private debt.

BlackRock and Partners Group announced a collaboration in September to develop so-called model portfolios, preset investment templates, for private markets.

Apollo Global Management teamed up with State Street to launch an exchange-traded fund.

Blackstone was among the first to recognize how important private wealth would be to the industry’s next leg of growth, launching Breit, its real-estate fund aimed at individuals, in 2017. The firm now has four big open-ended funds aimed at individuals, focused on real estate, direct lending, private equity and infrastructure, with another credit fund on the way. As of the end of the fourth quarter, $260 billion of Blackstone’s $1.1 trillion in assets under management came from private wealth, dwarfing such assets of rivals.

The nearly 100-year-old Wellington manages $1.3 trillion for institutional investors such as pension funds, endowments and insurers. Vanguard, founded in 1975, manages $10.4 trillion and is best known for its low-cost passive funds.

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