GLM-5.2

GLM-5.2 is Z.ai's flagship foundation model, released in June 2026 and — this is the part that matters — published under an MIT licence with no regional restrictions. That combination is rare: a model competitive with closed Western flagships on long-horizon coding work, whose weights anyone can download, self-host and use commercially without asking permission. Z.ai's own documentation describes a text-in, text-out model with a one-million-token context window and up to 128,000 tokens of output, supporting multiple thinking modes, streaming, function calling, context caching, structured JSON output and MCP tool integration. On Terminal-Bench 2.1 the documentation puts GLM-5.2 at 81.0 against 62.0 for its own predecessor GLM-5.1, and behind Claude Opus 4.8 at 85.0 — a candid comparison to include in your own product page, and a useful one, because it places the model precisely: at or near the top of the open-weight field, still short of the best closed model on that particular benchmark. The size of the model is no longer a matter of reporting: Z.ai published the weights, and the safetensors index on Hugging Face totals 753.3 billion parameters across 78 layers, with 256 routed experts plus one shared and eight active per token. What remains press-sourced is the rest — about 40 billion active parameters per token, an "IndexShare" attention scheme said to cut per-token FLOPs at long context, and scores such as 74.4% on FrontierSWE and 62.1 on SWE-bench Pro, with running costs reported at roughly one-sixth of GPT-5.5 for comparable coding tasks. Z.ai does not publish the parameter count in its model documentation, so we flag those numbers as reported rather than confirmed. The weights are distributed through Hugging Face and the model is served through Z.ai's own API and a long list of third-party coding tools.

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GLM-5.2 lost seven points on a coding benchmark without a single weight changing. The benchmark grades on a curve

9/13/2026 · FrontierSWE V1 leaderboard (Proximal); Z.ai — GLM-5.2 model card and GLM-5.3 launch post

Stripe paid over $7bn for a shop where one model carries 31 prices — the company that built it ranks 19th

8/18/2026 · OpenRouter API (models/endpoints), Z.ai pricing documentation, Bloomberg

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