A Chinese AI company just released a model that performs nearly on par with the best offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI, but charges roughly one-tenth the price.
Z.AI, the global-facing brand of Zhipu AI, launched its flagship GLM-5.2 model in mid-June 2026. The open-weight Mixture-of-Experts model packs roughly 744B to 753B parameters, supports a 1M-token context window, and is specifically tuned for long-horizon agentic coding and reasoning tasks. It’s available under an MIT license on Hugging Face, which means anyone can download it, modify it, and deploy it without asking permission.
The price gap is hard to ignore
GLM-5.2’s API pricing lands at approximately $0.95 to $2 per million input tokens and $3 to $6 per million output tokens.
For comparison, leading closed models from the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI charge between $5 and $15 per million input tokens and $30 to $75 per million output tokens. In English: Z.AI is offering roughly 80-90% savings on the same type of work.
