GLM 4.5 Air: pricing, context and benchmarks

What you need to know about GLM 4.5 Air

GLM 4.5 Air was released by Z.ai (Zhipu) (China) on July 25, 2025. It accepts text as input and produces text. Its context window reaches 131,072 tokens, larger than 29 % of the models in the registry, and it can write up to 98,304 tokens in one go.

It has been available for about 15 months, long enough for its prices and scores to have settled.

GLM 4.5 Air pricing

On OpenRouter, GLM 4.5 Air costs $0.13 per million input tokens and $0.85 per million output tokens. Counting three tokens read for every token written, its average price is $0.31 per million, more expensive than 30 % of paid models (2.5 times cheaper than the median of $0.76).

A concrete example: a task that sends 2,000 tokens (about 1,500 words) and receives a 500-token answer costs $0.0007. At 1,000 tasks a day, budget $21 a month. The price calculator redoes this with your own volumes.

Tokens already sent and cached are billed at $0.025 per million.

Performance and benchmarks

Epoch AI does not yet publish a capabilities index for GLM 4.5 Air. We therefore show no made-up performance rating: only price, context and features count towards its score.

Features, privacy and local use

• It supports tool calling, so it can drive an AI agent, call APIs or MCP servers.
• It is a reasoning model: it "thinks" before answering, which helps on hard tasks but uses more output tokens.
• Its knowledge stops at December 2024.

Its weights are open and downloadable from Hugging Face (mit licence): you can run it on your own machines without sending your data to a third party. With 110,468,824,832 billion parameters, it needs about 61,729,266,214 GB of memory at 4-bit quantisation. Check with the VRAM calculator. It was downloaded 943,281 times on Hugging Face last month.

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