Z.ai (Zhipu AI)

Z.ai, formerly Zhipu AI, is the Beijing lab behind the GLM family and the most credible open-weight challenger to the closed frontier. GLM-5.2 shipped June 13, 2026: a 744 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model with a 1 million token context window, 131K max output, a Max-effort reasoning mode, and MIT-licensed weights, priced around $1.40 input and $4.40 output per million tokens. It sits fourth overall and first among open-weight models on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 51, with a vendor-reported 62.1 on SWE-Bench Pro that would top GPT-5.5. The strategically important fact is the hardware: the training pipeline ran on roughly 100,000 Huawei Ascend 910B chips with zero Nvidia in the loop, at an estimated $25 million all-in, which makes GLM the proof case that frontier-adjacent training no longer requires US silicon. Reporting puts GLM-5.2 at something like 40 percent of developer tokens flowing through OpenRouter. The practical catch is that full-precision self-hosting needs about 1.5TB of GPU memory, roughly nineteen H100s. Two releases in August 2026 extended the family in different directions. GLM-5.3 launched API-first on August 14 at the same $1.40/$4.40 rate, built by extended post-training on the GLM-5.2 base rather than a new pretrain, and its weights finally reached Hugging Face on August 28 after a two-week safety review. GLM-5.3 Flash followed on August 26 as a separate model rather than a cheaper 5.3: the first natively multimodal GLM-5, a 320 billion parameter MoE activating roughly 18 billion per token, 1M context, MIT weights, and list pricing of $0.15 input and $0.50 output, roughly a tenth of the text flagship on input. A 50 percent launch promotion on Flash runs through September 9, 2026, so the list rate is the one to budget.