| Model | Score | Status | Released | Price in/out | Context | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLM-5.3-Flash low-cost multimodal coding and computer-use agents | 8.6 | GA | 2026-08-26 | $0.15 / $0.50 | 1M | Review → |
| GLM-5.3 open-weights long-horizon coding and security agents | 8.7 | GA | 2026-08-14 | $1.40 / $4.40 | 1M | Review → |
| GLM-5.2 open-weights frontier coding agents | 8.8 | GA | 2026-06-16 | $1.40 / $4.40 | 1M | Review → |
Z.ai superseded GLM-5.2 with GLM-5.3 on 2026-08-14, a post-training update on the same base model at the same price; GLM-5.2 stays GA and listed on Z.ai's API. GLM-5.2 is the moment open weights stopped trailing: Z.ai's flagship 753B-parameter MoE (40B active) beats GPT-5.5 on multiple long-horizon coding benchmarks — SWE-bench Pro 62.1 vs 58.6 — at roughly one sixth the price, under a plain MIT license with a 1M-token context window. Released 2026-06-16, it took the #1 open-weights slot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (51, before the index was rescaled) within a week, and its selectable reasoning effort plus visible thinking make it the most credible self-hostable alternative to the closed frontier as of mid-2026.
Full review →GLM-5.3-Flash is Z.ai's low-cost model and the first natively multimodal model in the GLM-5 series, released on 2026-08-26 with MIT-licensed open weights on Hugging Face the same day. It is a new 320B-parameter mixture-of-experts with 18B active parameters and a hybrid of linear and sparse attention, built so that a 1M-token context stays cheap to serve. It reads images, video and files as well as text, and Z.ai pitches it as a default model for coding, computer-use and office-document agents. Z.ai reports that it beats GLM-5.2 across its benchmarks, nearly matches Claude Opus 4.8 on Z.ai's coding benchmark, and scores 57 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. The sentence a buyer needs: frontier-adjacent agent results with vision at $0.15 / $0.50, about a tenth of GLM-5.3's price and under plain MIT, but every figure is Z.ai's own and reasoning is always on.
Full review →