“ GLM-5.2 is Fully Open, Frontier Intelligence Belongs to Everyone
Today, the sudden restriction of certain frontier models is deeply regrettable. At a time when access to frontier models is abruptly cut off for non-technical reasons, we are even more convinced of one thing: science should be global.
The path to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) must never be enclosed by high walls. We have always believed that AGI should be the cornerstone for all of humanity to collaboratively explore the boundaries of intelligence and solve complex challenges, rather than a privilege monopolized by a few rules and subject to revocation at any moment. In the face of external blockades and restrictions, our attitude is one of radical openness. Frontier intelligence must remain open-source, accessible, and buildable, serving every dedicated developer.
GLM-5.2 is Zhipu's most capable open-source model to date. It not only supports a truly usable 1M context window but also maintains a continuous lead in the independent completion of long-horizon tasks, providing solid foundational support for building complex agent applications. It also continues to be our main engine for creating the strongest domestic coding model.
Tonight at 5:21—at this special moment—GLM-5.2 will officially be available to all GLM Coding Plan users (including Lite / Pro / Max). The API will also go live next week.
A step closer to frontier intelligence for everyone. The future of AI is open, and it is for the people. ModelKey: GLM-5.2”
Inference is actually quite cheap for token costs, the frontier labs burn most of their money on training new models, priced into their token costs ontop of some margins and paying record salaries. So if this goes open, distills are tried out, independent providers around the world host it with actual price competition, the house of cards for anthropic collapses pre-ipo. The floor is opus (open models caught up), the current ceiling is Mythos (self inflicted ban due to the safety bullshit theater), and no way out.
It’s really comical I think it’s even the same guy that warned about gpt2 being too dangerous to release, well that mindset seems to now doing existential harm to anthropic, while the rest of the world essentially laughs and progresses anyway.
Can’t rely on strategic products if they’re gated by capricious actors.
Open weight models are basically immune to that
For me, at work I use opus to plan, brainstorm, grill, ask questions about my codebase, etc. It is pretty good about understanding the codebase holistically and providing architecturally clean solutions that actually work. Then I use sonnet as a plan executor and it does well. Follows instructions and runs tests and just overall does great.
At home I make some toy projects using opencode go (I've standardized on deepseek 4 pro as my opus replacement) but it's pretty obvious from the amount of times I've had to fix or revert a change that broke something that it's no opus. I got similar results with kimi. Have not played too much with Qwen.
So I'm wondering what I'd use to get a similar stack at work. Folks say that this version of glm is basically Jan 2026 opus pre me f. Big if true. So would I use GLM for plan and Deepseek v4 pro/flash for execution? Or maybe Kimi or Qwen? I know I'll probably never get as good quality code as I do at work but I'm just toying around here.
But still, thank you for the release
My alternate universe would involve some sort of decentralized investing scheme to build data centers running massive open source models that could compete on some level with Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.
The trend also seems pretty clear. These models will keep getting better. Coding may already be close to a "solved" problem for LLMs. Yes ofc there will always be frontier stuff that you need gigantic cutting edge models for but let's be honest, most software is not that.
- Ethics. As known, ou American frontier AI companies are incredibly ethical. And I have yet to see any interviews or blog posts by Chinese companies where they talk about how they are ethical, or at least credible HN comments about it.
- Safety. Do they covertly sabotage or at least refuse to answer questions that could help cyber- and bioterrorists in their nefarious purposes? What about ML-related questions that could help terrorists create AI models without guardrails?
- Child safety. This is especially important with "free for all" open-weight models, most of which are Chinese (ever think about why that's the case?). How are we going to do age verification and KYC with models that anyone can just download on their computer?
- Intellectual property theft. How can we be sure that no output of our American frontier AI models was used while training these Chinese models?
Frankly, there's a plethora of other issues I don't have time to get into right now. Personally, I believe distribution of Chinese models in the US should be paused until they are required to submit models to the government for review and evaluation, to make sure they are made to Anthropic/OpenAI standards.
We need legal grounds for that.
Write to your congressman, congresswoman or congressperson and urge them to stop proliferation of dangerous non-American intelligence. This is a matter of national security and needs to be acted upon as soon as possible, preferably before IPO.
I use 5.1 on and off because it chokes on complex tasks (it ends up in a loop. maybe its because i can actually read the though proces, maybe opus does the same but we are not aware).
Curious if 5.2 doesn't have this issue, then I am genuinely switching.
I'm running different projects in ChatGPT 5.5, Claude (Opus 4.7/4.7) and GLM 5.2 is nice - worth evaluating yourself :)
Also seems much more determined to do things the "right" way. e.g. Saw hardcoded credentials and wanted to purge that from git history and integrate a vault into the project
Feels a little slower, but I suspect what I'm feeling is verbose thinking rather than slower raw tokens
From a very subjective KingBench v3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkFThJWJgg8, the results are promising. Curious for more standardized results as well. And for Simmon's pelican.
I only wish I was able to run this locally
Anyone else experiencing the same?
With a good harness and instruction set, frankly I don't see the difference
People should stop thinking "Chinese = cheap", and maybe read less US propaganda