GLM 4.6: pricing, context and benchmarks

What you need to know about GLM 4.6

GLM 4.6 was released by Z.ai (Zhipu) (China) on September 30, 2025. It accepts text as input and produces text. Its context window reaches 204,800 tokens, larger than 39 % of the models in the registry, and it can write up to 131,072 tokens in one go.

It has been available for about 13 months, long enough for its prices and scores to have settled.

GLM 4.6 pricing

On OpenRouter, GLM 4.6 costs $0.55 per million input tokens and $2.2 per million output tokens. Counting three tokens read for every token written, its average price is $0.963 per million, more expensive than 56 % of paid models (1.3 times 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 $0.0022. At 1,000 tasks a day, budget $66 a month. The price calculator redoes this with your own volumes.

Tokens already sent and cached are billed at $0.11 per million.

Performance and benchmarks

Epoch AI does not yet publish a capabilities index for GLM 4.6. We therefore show no made-up performance rating: only price, context and features count towards its score.

Scores published by Epoch AI on the benchmarks the site tracks:

Features, privacy and local use

• It supports tool calling, so it can drive an AI agent, call APIs or MCP servers.
• It can answer in an enforced JSON format (structured outputs).
• It is a reasoning model: it "thinks" before answering, which helps on hard tasks but uses more output tokens.
• Its knowledge stops at March 2025.

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 356,785,898,816 billion parameters, it needs about 199,369,657,123 GB of memory at 4-bit quantisation. Check with the VRAM calculator. It was downloaded 22,433 times on Hugging Face last month.

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