The careers of Z.ai's Tang Jie and Moonshot AI's Yang Zhilin, once teacher and pupil at Tsinghua University, show that China's AI leap is no sudden development (Raffaele Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Tang Jie, founder of Z.ai, and Yang Zhilin, co-founder of Moonshot AI, were once teacher and student at Tsinghua University, and their successive ventures illustrate a continuous Chinese effort to build competitive AI models. Both companies employ a mix of original research and imitation of leading firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI, and they have demonstrated clear strategies for commercializing their technologies.