Zhipu’s 100M Token Giveaway Is Not About Tokens. It’s About the Funnel.

The first sign was a flood. Zhipu AI’s free token promotion for GLM-5.3 had barely launched before demand exceeded the limit, forcing the company to pause and reset the rules. Five thousand developers had been offered 100 million tokens each, but the incentive was never the real story. The signal was locked inside a smaller phrase: tokens could only be used inside ZCode.