Z-ai News

China’s open-source bet

Silicon Valley AI companies follow a familiar playbook: Keep the secret sauce behind an API, and charge for every drop. China’s leading AI labs are playing a different game: They ship models as downloadable “open-weight” packages. This lets developers adapt the models and run them on their own hardware to build products without negotiating a…

[AINews] AI Engineer Europe 2026

Two quiet days in a row let us reflect on the first AIE in London.

New GPT $100 plan and Anthropic's managed agents

Z.ai: GLM 5.1 (z-ai/glm-5.1)

GLM-5.1 delivers a major leap in coding capability, with particularly significant gains in handling long-horizon tasks. Unlike previous models built around minute-level interactions, GLM-5.1 can work independently and continuously on...

Z.ai: GLM 5V Turbo (z-ai/glm-5v-turbo)

GLM-5V-Turbo is Z.ai’s first native multimodal agent foundation model, built for vision-based coding and agent-driven tasks. It natively handles image, video, and text inputs, excels at long-horizon planning, complex coding, and task execution, and works seamlessly with agents to complete the full loop of “perceive → plan → execute“.

[AINews] H100 prices are melting *UP*

a quiet day lets us report an important GPU trend

[AINews] MiniMax 2.7: GLM-5 at 1/3 cost SOTA Open Model

congrats MiniMax!!

[AINews] Anthropic accuses DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of >16 million "industrial-scale distillation attacks"

the US-China cold war takes a big step up

[AINews] Qwen3.5-397B-A17B: the smallest Open-Opus class, very efficient model

Congrats Qwen team!

What’s next for Chinese open-source AI

The past year has marked a turning point for Chinese AI. Since DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model in January 2025, Chinese companies have repeatedly delivered AI models that match the performance of leading Western models at a fraction of the cost. Just last week the Chinese firm Moonshot AI released its latest open-weight model,…

[AINews] Z.ai GLM-5: New SOTA Open Weights LLM

We have Opus 4.5 at home

Z.ai: GLM 5 (z-ai/glm-5)

GLM-5 is Z.ai’s flagship open-source foundation model engineered for complex systems design and long-horizon agent workflows. Built for expert developers, it delivers production-grade performance on large-scale programming tasks, rivaling leading closed-source models. With advanced agentic planning, deep backend reasoning, and iterative self-correction, GLM-5 moves beyond code generation to full-system construction and autonomous execution.

Z.AI: GLM 4.7 Flash (z-ai/glm-4.7-flash)

As a 30B-class SOTA model, GLM-4.7-Flash offers a new option that balances performance and efficiency. It is further optimized for agentic coding use cases, strengthening coding capabilities, long-horizon task planning, and tool collaboration, and has achieved leading performance among open-source models of the same size on several current public benchmark leaderboards.

Startups go public in litmus test for Chinese AI

Leading Chinese artificial intelligence startup Zhipu AI soared as it went public in Hong Kong on Thursday, a day before rival MiniMax also makes its market debut in a litmus test for the country's rapidly developing sector.

Z.AI: GLM 4.7 (z-ai/glm-4.7)

GLM-4.7 is Z.AI’s latest flagship model, featuring upgrades in two key areas: enhanced programming capabilities and more stable multi-step reasoning/execution. It demonstrates significant improvements in executing complex agent tasks while delivering more natural conversational experiences and superior front-end aesthetics.

Z.AI: GLM 4.6V (z-ai/glm-4.6v)

GLM-4.6V is a large multimodal model designed for high-fidelity visual understanding and long-context reasoning across images, documents, and mixed media. It supports up to 128K tokens, processes complex page layouts and charts directly as visual inputs, and integrates native multimodal function calling to connect perception with downstream tool execution. The model also enables interleaved image-text generation and UI reconstruction workflows, including screenshot-to-HTML synthesis and iterative visual editing.

Z.AI: GLM 4.6 (z-ai/glm-4.6)

Compared with GLM-4.5, this generation brings several key improvements: Longer context window: The context window has been expanded from 128K to 200K tokens, enabling the model to handle more complex agentic tasks. Superior coding performance: The model achieves higher scores on code benchmarks and demonstrates better real-world performance in applications such as Claude Code、Cline、Roo Code and Kilo Code, including improvements in generating visually polished front-end pages. Advanced reasoning: GLM-4.6 shows a clear improvement in reasoning performance and supports tool use during inference, leading to stronger overall capability. More capable agents: GLM-4.6 exhibits stronger performance in tool using and search-based agents, and integrates more effectively within agent frameworks. Refined writing: Better aligns with human preferences in style and readability, and performs more naturally in role-playing scenarios.

Z.AI: GLM 4.5V (z-ai/glm-4.5v)

GLM-4.5V is a vision-language foundation model for multimodal agent applications. Built on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 106B parameters and 12B activated parameters, it achieves state-of-the-art results in video understanding, image Q&A, OCR, and document parsing, with strong gains in front-end web coding, grounding, and spatial reasoning. It offers a hybrid inference mode: a "thinking mode" for deep reasoning and a "non-thinking mode" for fast responses. Reasoning behavior can be toggled via the `reasoning` `enabled` boolean. Learn more in our docs

Z.AI: GLM 4.5 (z-ai/glm-4.5)

GLM-4.5 is our latest flagship foundation model, purpose-built for agent-based applications. It leverages a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture and supports a context length of up to 128k tokens. GLM-4.5 delivers significantly enhanced capabilities in reasoning, code generation, and agent alignment. It supports a hybrid inference mode with two options, a "thinking mode" designed for complex reasoning and tool use, and a "non-thinking mode" optimized for instant responses. Users can control the reasoning behaviour with the `reasoning` `enabled` boolean. Learn more in our docs

Z.AI: GLM 4.5 Air (free) (z-ai/glm-4.5-air)

GLM-4.5-Air is the lightweight variant of our latest flagship model family, also purpose-built for agent-centric applications. Like GLM-4.5, it adopts the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture but with a more compact parameter size. GLM-4.5-Air also supports hybrid inference modes, offering a "thinking mode" for advanced reasoning and tool use, and a "non-thinking mode" for real-time interaction. Users can control the reasoning behaviour with the `reasoning` `enabled` boolean. Learn more in our docs