Chinese startup’s latest AI model has landed fourth on one of the industry’s most closely watched intelligence rankings, and it costs a fraction of what Anthropic or OpenAI charge for comparable performance.
GLM-5.2, released last month by Beijing-based Z.ai, has become the talk of Silicon Valley for coding and agentic capabilities that edge close to the leading American systems, prompting comparisons to DeepSeek’s market-rattling debut in 2025.
According to Artificial Analysis, GLM-5.2 scores 51 on the firm’s Intelligence Index v4.1, placing it fourth overall and first among all open-weight models, ahead of MiniMax-M3, DeepSeek V4 Pro and Kimi K2.6.
On Code Arena’s front-end coding leaderboard, the model’s Max tier holds second place, ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Opus variants.
The pricing is the part that has unsettled rivals. Z.ai charges $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens on its first-party API, and third-party hosts list it even lower.
