A cheap Chinese AI model is closing in on Anthropic and OpenAI
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Chinese startup Z.ai has released GLM-5.2, an open-weight AI model that ranks fourth on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index v4.1 and first among all open-weight models. It costs $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens — roughly one-fifth to one-seventh the price of Claude Opus or GPT-5.5. Former White House AI czar David Sacks called it roughly on par with current OpenAI and Anthropic offerings. Notably, the model was trained entirely on domestic Chinese hardware (Huawei Ascend 910B chips), sidestepping US export controls on Nvidia and AMD processors. Released under an MIT license, it can be downloaded and run freely. A successor model, GLM-5.5, is expected in August.
