A cheap Chinese AI model is closing in on Anthropic and OpenAI
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...
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