2026-06-16 · Research GLM-5.2: Built NEW CHINESE MODEL just dropped. FREE. Open source.

So a Chinese company called Z.ai has released a model called GLM 5.2 literally last week. And the reason why I'm actually making a video on it is because from what I've seen, it is either on par or as powerful as the Fable 5 model that the US government forced Anthropic to remove around two weeks ago. This GLM 5.2 model is completely open source, completely free to download and it has an MIT license, meaning you can use it without restriction. And it has remaining second only to the Opus series. Across all three benchmarks, GLM 5.2 is the highest ranked open-source model, showing that its 1M context has translated into practical long-horizon delivery capability. On standard coding benchmarks, GLM 5.2 is the strongest open-source model, improving on GLM 5.1 by a wide margin: 81.0 vs. 63.5 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 62.1 vs. 58.4 on SWE-bench Pro. It also closes much of the gap to the closed-source frontier - on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (81.0) it lands within a few points of Claude Opus 4.8 (85.0) - while staying ahead of Gemini 3.1 Pro. And you know what I've always said, always take the benchmarks with a grain of salt. Okay, but these are pretty interesting, right? Because in my opinion, GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 are the most powerful models out there right now. This GLM 5.2 sits in between, beating GPT-5.5 on almost all of these benchmarks. It also beat Fable 5 in one specific test, which is quite crazy. And as you can see here, it actually says that GLM 5.2 is the highest ranked open-source model out right now. And in terms of its pricing, it costs $4 per 1M input/output tokens, and Opus 4.8 costs $25 per 1M input/output tokens. So it's significantly cheaper than any model on the market right now. So if you do want to use it, seems like OpenRouter is, you know, the easiest and most simplistic way to actually get this set up and use it inside of places like Cursa and Claude code. So head over to OpenRouter, not affiliated with them, just my personal opinion. And then go ahead and generate an API key. And then tell Claude code, hey, I want to set up GLM 5.2 as a model option using this OpenRouter API key and it will walk you through the setup in less than five minutes. And lastly, just to touch on its strongest use cases. Design and creative workflows. High-volume text processing. Self-hosted deployments. Fine-tuning projects. Go ahead, use it. Let me know how it is. I'm definitely going to set this one up for myself and see, you know, if it's better than Opus 4.8 or you know, the Sonic 4.6. I've been using for cloud code. But with that being said, follow for more free game.