GLM-5 Costs 86% Less Than Claude Opus. The Safety Gap Might Cost More.
Z.ai's GLM-5 matches 96% of Claude Opus's coding score at 14% of the price. A safety researcher says the model's execution traces look like a paperclip maximizer.
Two weeks ago, Moonshot crowned its Kimi K2.5 the most powerful open-source language model on the planet. Engineers circulated benchmarks on social media within the hour, and procurement teams started scheduling evaluations.
That reign lasted 14 days.
On Tuesday in Beijing, z.ai released GLM-5, a 744-billion-parameter model that outscores most Western competitors on code generation while costing a fraction of what they charge. The license is MIT. No contract required. Artificial Analysis ranked it the new open-source leader within hours.
Maps the India–Germany–U.S. AI triangle from New Delhi. Background in cross-market operations and business development. Writes about supply chains, enterprise adoption, and talent—the unsexy forces that actually move global AI.
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