GLM-5 is Zhipu AI's latest open-weight frontier model, released April 7, 2026 — the same day Anthropic gated Claude Mythos. GLM-5 outperforms GPT-5.4 on coding benchmarks (HumanEval, SWE-bench Verified, MBPP) by a clear margin, making it the strongest open-source coding model available in 2026. Zhipu AI spun out of Tsinghua University and has been one of China's most prolific open AI labs.
GLM-5 ships as open weights on Hugging Face under a commercially permissive license. Self-hosting is straightforward via vLLM, SGLang, or llama.cpp. Zhipu also publishes an evaluation harness so anyone can verify the benchmark claims independently. A hosted API is available via Zhipu's platform.
Free to self-host. Hosted API via Zhipu: approximately $0.30-$1 per M tokens depending on the variant. Fine-tuning tools available open source.
Chinese tech companies, open-source developers prioritizing coding ability, and builders who want a frontier-class coding model without paying OpenAI or Anthropic.