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.
Multiple outlets have pegged that at somewhere between a fifth and a seventh of what Claude Opus or GPT-5.5 cost per output token, though the exact ratio shifts depending on which provider and tier is being compared. Either way, it undercuts the closed American frontier by a wide margin.
David Sacks, who served as the White House’s AI czar under Donald Trump before returning to the private sector, said the model was “as good as the currently available models from OpenAI and Anthropic,” describing it as sitting just below Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and roughly level with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5.
That is a striking claim from someone who, only weeks earlier, was estimating the US lead over Chinese labs at six to nine months rather than conceding rough parity outright.
Beyond the headline intelligence score, GLM-5.2 also tops Artificial Analysis’s GDPval-AA v2 metric, which measures real-world agentic work rather than abstract reasoning puzzles. There it scores 1,524, ahead of MiniMax-M3 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, and close enough to GPT-5.5 on its highest reasoning setting that the two are effectively tied.
Analysts have flagged one trade-off worth noting: the model uses noticeably more output tokens per task than its open-weight peers, which eats into some of its cost advantage in practice even as the sticker price stays comparatively low.
GLM-5.2 also arrives with a detail that matters more than the benchmark scores: it was trained and runs on domestic Chinese silicon, reportedly a cluster of roughly 100,000 Huawei Ascend 910B processors, without Nvidia, AMD or Intel hardware at any stage.
That is a direct answer to Washington’s chip restrictions, which have aimed to slow Chinese AI progress by cutting off access to the most advanced processors.
The model’s weights are released under an unrestricted MIT licence, meaning any company can download, modify and run it locally for the cost of electricity alone.
The timing has helped Z.ai’s case. Washington’s order forcing Anthropic to suspend Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign users, combined with the Trump administration’s request that OpenAI stagger the rollout of its own next model, has left a gap in the market that a free, capable, downloadable alternative is well placed to fill.
That backdrop sits inside the broader story of tightening US export controls on advanced chips, which Chinese labs have spent the past two years working around rather than waiting out.
Z.ai’s listed entity has felt the effect directly. Shares in the Hong Kong-listed company have risen sharply since its stock market debut in January, with trading spikes around GLM-5.2’s release pushing the stock up several multiples over its IPO price. A successor model, GLM-5.5, is expected in August, though Z.ai has not confirmed a firm date.
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