Everything about GLM-5

GLM-5 at a glance

Zhipu AI (Z.ai) released GLM-5 on February 12, 2026. It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money. It is an open-weight model: you can host it yourself on infrastructure you control, and 44 API providers listed on models.dev also offer it. That makes it 8 months old as of October 22, 2026.

We file it under open-weight models (68 models in this category on the site).

Benchmark results

According to results published by Epoch AI (checked on October 22, 2026), GLM-5 has a capability index of 77.2 out of 100, computed on 4 benchmarks from our basket.

It is not among the top 30 of the weekly ranking.

• GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science questions): 87.8% — the best tracked model, Gemini 4 Argon, reaches 96.4%
• OTIS Mock AIME (competition mathematics problems): 80% — the best tracked model, GPT-5.5 Pro, reaches 100%
• SWE-bench Verified (fixing real software bugs): 72.1% — the best tracked model, Claude Opus 4.7, reaches 83.5%
• Terminal-Bench (agent tasks in a terminal): 52.4% — the best tracked model, GPT-5.5, reaches 84.7%

Technical specifications

Its context window reaches 204,800 tokens, roughly 307 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough for a long report or several contracts at once. A single answer can run to 131,072 tokens.

It accepts as input: text.

It can call tools (functions, APIs), which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

The weights are published on Hugging Face (zai-org/GLM-5): 753.9 billion parameters, mit license and 977,411 downloads over the last 30 days. See also our list of open-source models.

How much does GLM-5 cost?

GLM-5 costs $0.60 per million input tokens and $2.69 per million output tokens (developer's price, checked on October 22, 2026).

In practice, an agent task that reads 20,000 tokens and writes 2,000 costs about $0.017, or $17.33 for 1,000 such tasks.

That is 2.7 times the median output price of open-weight models ($1).

Tokens read back from cache cost $0.15 per million, which helps an agent that keeps resending the same context.

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

When to choose it

Given its category, GLM-5 is mainly aimed at projects where you want control over your data or hosting, or want to adapt the model to your field.

Its Terminal-Bench result (52.4%, above the median of tracked models) makes it a serious candidate for coding agents.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

Alternatives

In the same category, the models closest to GLM-5 are:

• Kimi K2.5 (Moonshot AI, index 78.1) — see the comparison
• GLM-5.3 (Zhipu AI (Z.ai), index 78.8) — see the comparison
• Muse Spark Open (Meta, index 75.2) — see the comparison
• Kimi K3 (Moonshot AI, index 80.7) — see the comparison