GLM-5.2: 744B MoE, 1M Context, MIT-Licensed (2026)

What is GLM-5.2?

GLM-5.2 is the open-weights flagship coding model released by Z.ai on 13 June 2026. Z.ai is the international brand of Zhipu AI, the Tsinghua University spinout that has shipped the General Language Model (GLM) lineage since 2021. The model was announced alongside the GLM Coding Plan tiers, with the metered API and the MIT-licensed weights rolling out over the following week (MarkTechPost, 14 June 2026).

The pitch is narrow and deliberate: long-horizon agentic coding at open-weights pricing. GLM-5.2 is a Mixture-of-Experts model of roughly 744 billion parameters that activates only about 40 billion per token, gives you a genuinely usable one-million-token context window, exposes multiple thinking-effort levels so you can trade latency for quality, and ships under the MIT license with no revenue thresholds and no regional restrictions. You can point Claude Code, Cline, or Cursor at it through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or download the checkpoint and run it inside your own VPC.

That combination is the whole reason it matters. Before GLM-5.2, a team that wanted Opus-class quality on multi-file refactors either paid closed-API rates or accepted a visible quality gap in exchange for controlling its own weights. GLM-5.2 narrowed that gap far enough that self-hosting became a real option for production coding agents rather than a compromise.

What are GLM-5.2's full specifications?

Sources: Z.ai's Hugging Face model card, the GLM-5.2 launch blog, vLLM's GLM-5.2 recipe, Artificial Analysis, and Sebastian Raschka's config-level architecture breakdown.

Why do sources disagree on the parameter count?

You will see 743B, 744B and 753B quoted for the same checkpoint, and all three are defensible. The spread comes from what each counter includes: whether the multi-token-prediction head, the embedding and output matrices, and the shared expert are folded into the total. vLLM derives 743B / 39B straight from config.json; Sebastian Raschka's layer-by-layer walkthrough lands on 744B / 40B; Z.ai's own model card and Artificial Analysis's model page both publish 753B. If you need one number, use ~744B total and ~40B active — that is the figure most third-party evaluations standardise on, and the ~40B active figure is the one that actually governs your inference cost and throughput.

How does the MoE routing actually work?

Each of the 75 sparse layers holds 256 routed experts plus one shared expert that always fires. The router picks 8 routed experts per token, so roughly 3% of the expert bank is live at any moment — that is how a 744B-parameter model runs at 40B-parameter cost. The attention side pairs MLA (queries, keys and values compressed to low-rank latents, with partial RoPE) with DeepSeek Sparse Attention, which uses a lightning indexer to retain only the 2,048 most relevant tokens per query rather than attending across the full million. IndexShare is the piece that makes 1M context economically sane: instead of recomputing the token-selection index at every sparse layer, GLM-5.2 computes it once and reuses the selected positions across the next three layers, while each layer still computes fresh queries and outputs. Z.ai's stated result is a 2.9× reduction in per-token FLOPs at maximum context — an architectural estimate, not an end-to-end wall-clock speedup.

Is GLM-5.3 out, and should you wait for it?

Yes — GLM-5.3 launched on 14 August 2026 and its weights went public on 25 August 2026 at zai-org/GLM-5.3. The eleven-day gap between launch and weight release came from what Z.ai described as its most extensive risk review to date, prompted by cyber-capability results that it says scaled faster than the team anticipated; the drop landed three days ahead of the ~28 August date Z.ai had signalled. One detail worth catching before you plan around it: GLM-5.3 is not MIT. The 5.2 repository is MIT; the 5.3 repository ships under a custom "glm-5.3" license.

Here is what actually changes:

Index figures re-read from Artificial Analysis on 5 October 2026 under Intelligence Index v4.3.2; Terminal-Bench 3.0 and DeepSWE numbers are Z.ai's own and are not yet independently reproduced. The GDPval-AA Elo row is historical — AA now folds GDPval-AA v2.1 into the index and no longer publishes a standalone per-model Elo, so those two numbers cannot be refreshed. At 45 on v4.3.2, GLM-5.3 is the second-highest open-weights score: one point ahead of Kimi K3 (44) and one point behind Xiaomi's MIT-licensed MiMo-V2.6-Pro (46). Claude Opus 5.5 leads the whole index at 58, which is a thirteen-point gap to the best open weights rather than the three-point gap the v4.1.1 numbers implied.

The recommendation depends on which path you are on, and it is unambiguous either way:

• If you use the GLM Coding Plan, you are already on 5.3. Z.ai's developer docs state plainly that "requests for previous models (GLM-5.2/GLM-5.1) will be automatically routed to GLM-5.3." There is no documented opt-out. Do nothing; you got the upgrade whether you asked for it or not.
• If you use the metered API, switch. GLM-5.3 costs exactly the same per token and scores eleven index points higher on v4.3.2 (45 against 34). There is no reason to keep pinning glm-5.2.
• If you self-host, the wait is over — and the decision is now a licensing one, not an availability one. Z.ai published the 5.3 weights on 25 August 2026. Because the base model is unchanged, every quantisation and hardware figure on this page carries straight over, so migrating is a checkpoint swap. The only reason to stay on 5.2 is that it is MIT and 5.3 is not: 5.3 ships under a custom "glm-5.3" license, which matters if you redistribute weights or operate under a procurement rule that names approved licenses.

We track the successor separately in the GLM-5.3 launch guide, and the cyber-capability claim that triggered the weights delay in GLM-5.3's cyber capabilities explained.

How much does GLM-5.2 cost?

Z.ai publishes flat per-token pricing with a heavily discounted cached-input rate. These are the official figures from Z.ai's pricing documentation:

What is GLM-5.2-Fast and is it worth the premium?

GLM-5.2-Fast is the same weights on throughput-tuned infrastructure. Quality and benchmark scores are identical to standard GLM-5.2 — the extra 64% on input and 82% on output buys latency only. Providers report roughly double the tokens-per-second of their standard GLM-5.2 endpoints, with peaks measured around 446 tok/s (Vercel AI Gateway). Note that GLM-5.2-Fast is a serving tier offered through gateways and resellers rather than a line item on Z.ai's own pricing table, so the exact rate varies slightly by provider.

The decision rule is simple: pay for Fast only when a human is waiting on the response. Interactive IDE completion and chat justify it. Batch refactors, nightly test generation, and background agent runs do not — at those volumes the 82% output premium is pure waste.

What about the GLM Coding Plan subscription?

For agent-heavy usage, the subscription is usually far cheaper than metered billing. Z.ai's developer-pack documentation confirms the plan starts at $18/month and publishes these credit allowances:

Z.ai's docs publish the $18 entry price and the credit quotas, but not per-tier prices for Pro and Max; third-party trackers report roughly $72–$80 for Pro and $160–$168 for Max depending on the promotion running, with a discount on annual billing. Treat those two figures as approximate and check the checkout page. All tiers bundle GLM-5.3, GLM-5-Turbo and GLM-4.7, and work directly inside Claude Code, Cline and similar harnesses.

How should you prompt GLM-5.2?

GLM-5.2 has genuinely different sampling recommendations from the OpenAI-family habits most developers carry around, and getting them wrong is the most common cause of disappointing output.

What sampling parameters does Z.ai recommend?

Do not set temperature=0 or 0.2 out of habit. Z.ai's model card recommends temperature 1.0 for both reasoning and general use, and only varies top-p. This is the single most impactful correction for teams migrating an existing prompt stack: low-temperature settings tuned for GPT-class models measurably degrade GLM-5.2's chain-of-thought quality, because the model's post-training assumes a full-entropy sampler. Turn the knob back to 1.0 and control determinism with a seed and structured output instead.

How do you control thinking effort?

GLM-5.2 exposes reasoning depth through two API parameters:

• thinking: {"type": "enabled"} or {"type": "disabled"} — the hard on/off switch for chain-of-thought.
• reasoning_effort — the depth dial. Z.ai's own examples use "max"; through OpenRouter the exposed levels are "high" and "xhigh".

Practical guidance: use max/xhigh effort for anything multi-file or multi-step — planning a refactor, debugging across module boundaries, writing a migration. It is slower and burns considerably more output tokens, but the benchmark gap between effort levels on long-horizon coding tasks is large. Use high effort for code review, documentation, single-function edits and anything where you would have reached for a smaller model anyway. Disable thinking entirely for classification, extraction and formatting calls, where the reasoning trace is pure cost.

What does a correct GLM-5.2 call look like?

The Z.ai API is OpenAI-SDK-compatible, so the only changes from an OpenAI call are the base URL, the model id, and the two thinking parameters:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    api_key="YOUR_ZAI_KEY",
    base_url="https://api.z.ai/api/paas/v4",
)

resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="glm-5.2",
    messages=[
        {"role": "system", "content": "You are a senior backend engineer. "
                                      "Make the smallest correct change."},
        {"role": "user", "content": "Refactor this Express handler to async/await..."},
    ],
    temperature=1.0,          # Z.ai's recommended default -- do not lower it
    top_p=1.0,                # 0.95 for reasoning-heavy prompts
    max_tokens=32000,
    extra_body={
        "thinking": {"type": "enabled"},
        "reasoning_effort": "max",
    },
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

Three more conventions worth knowing:

• Tool calling uses the standard OpenAI tools and tool_choice fields, and structured output works through JSON Schema in response_format. No vendor-specific tool syntax to learn — this is why GLM-5.2 drops into existing agent harnesses cleanly.
• System prompts should specify output shape explicitly. Z.ai's own evaluation harness uses a rigid template for exact-answer tasks: "Your response should be in the following format:\nExplanation: {explanation}\nExact Answer: {answer}\nConfidence: {0-100%}". The model follows format instructions reliably; it is less reliable at inferring an unstated one.
• Front-load context, do not chunk it. The 1M window plus $0.26/M cached input means the economically correct pattern is to paste the whole service into the prompt and cache it, rather than building a retrieval layer. A cached 200K-token codebase costs about five cents per call.

How does GLM-5.2 score on benchmarks?

Z.ai published no benchmark numbers in the initial launch post, which is unusual for a flagship release. The figures below combine Z.ai's later first-party model-card table with independent evaluations.

Benchmark rows one to four are from Z.ai's own launch blog; Intelligence Index scores re-read from Artificial Analysis on 5 October 2026 under index v4.3.2 (GLM-5.2 Max, Claude Opus 4.8 Max, GPT-5.5 Xhigh), with the Elo row retained unchanged from AA's 17 June 2026 writeup because AA no longer publishes it; MCP-Atlas via The Decoder.

The honest reading in October 2026: GLM-5.2 beats GPT-5.5 on SWE-bench Pro, FrontierSWE, PostTrainBench and MCP-Atlas, and trails Claude Opus 4.8 on all of them — narrowly on FrontierSWE and MCP-Atlas, more clearly on SWE-bench Pro. It was the leading open-weights model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at launch, and it has fallen a long way back from that. On index v4.3.2 GLM-5.2 scores 34, against 46 for MiMo-V2.6-Pro, 45 for GLM-5.3 and 44 for Kimi K3 — and 36 for DeepSeek V4 Pro, which now edges GLM-5.2 on the general index even though GLM-5.2 still leads it on the coding-specific benchmarks in the table above. Claude Opus 5.5 leads the whole index at 58. GLM-5.2 is no longer the strongest open-weights model you can download; it is the strongest MIT-licensed one with a 1M window, which is a much narrower claim.

One efficiency caveat worth planning around: completing Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index v4.3.2 took GLM-5.2 180M output tokens, against 120M for MiniMax-M3 and 180M for Kimi K2.6 — so GLM-5.2 is verbose next to MiniMax, but it is no longer the outlier against Kimi K2.6 that the v4.1.1-era per-task figures suggested. The resulting bill is $1.47 per index task for GLM-5.2, versus $0.51 for MiniMax-M3 and $0.80 for Kimi K2.6. At $4.40/M output that is cheap in absolute terms, but it lands as latency in interactive agents and as real money at agent-fleet scale.

How do you run GLM-5.2 yourself?

Three paths, lowest to highest operational lift.

Path 1 — the Z.ai API or a gateway

Lowest friction, and correct for most teams. Point an OpenAI SDK at https://api.z.ai/api/paas/v4 with model id glm-5.2, or route through OpenRouter as z-ai/glm-5.2 if you already have keys there. For coding-agent-heavy usage, the GLM Coding Plan subscription almost always beats metered billing — though remember it now serves GLM-5.3 for GLM-5.2 requests.

Path 2 — quantised GGUF on your own hardware

Unsloth publishes dynamic GGUF quants that compress the 1.51 TB BF16 checkpoint dramatically:

Unsloth reports the 2-bit dynamic quant retaining roughly 82% of BF16 accuracy across its evaluation set while being 84% smaller, with throughput in the 3–9 tokens/second range on consumer hardware depending on memory bandwidth and offloading strategy. Workable configurations: a 256 GB unified-memory Mac fits the 2-bit quant directly; a single 24 GB GPU plus 256 GB system RAM works with MoE offloading; multi-GPU rigs such as 4×3090 land inside the same throughput envelope per community reports. One caveat for local runs: mainline llama.cpp still falls back to dense attention because the sparse DSA path is unsupported (issue #24730), so long-context throughput sits below the advertised numbers. Our step-by-step walkthrough is in how to run GLM-5.2 locally.

Path 3 — vLLM or SGLang for production serving

For high-QPS, low-latency, or data-residency-constrained deployments, vLLM with the FP8 checkpoint is the canonical route. vLLM's own recipe recommends the FP8 checkpoint on 8×H200 or H20 with tensor parallelism of 8, and enabling GLM-5.2's five-token MTP draft path via --speculative-config.num_speculative_tokens 5. NVFP4 and AMD Quark MXFP4 builds also exist. Weight memory at FP8 is roughly 744 GB and BF16 roughly 1.49 TB before KV cache and runtime overhead. On vLLM, expert parallelism is --enable-expert-parallel; on SGLang it is --enable-moe-ep.

Cluster sizing, KV-cache tuning, and the vLLM-versus-SGLang decision for MoE workloads are covered across model families in our self-hosting LLMs guide.

How does GLM-5.2 compare to other open-weights models?

The practical heuristic as of October 2026, on index v4.3.2:

• You need MIT-licensed weights on disk today, for agentic coding. This is no longer the walkover it was in August. Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6-Pro is also MIT and scores 46 on index v4.3.2 to GLM-5.2's 34, at $0.13 per index task against $1.47. GLM-5.2 keeps a verified 1M-token window and a far longer track record in third-party agent harnesses, so benchmark both against your own repository instead of taking either index score on faith.
• You want the highest open-weights score. MiMo-V2.6-Pro at 46 is the current ceiling, ahead of GLM-5.3 (45) and Kimi K3 (44) — and it is MIT, so there is no license trade to make. If you do shortlist Kimi K3, check whether its revenue thresholds apply to you before committing.
• You are cost-sensitive at high volume. DeepSeek V4 Flash is the cheap workhorse; you trade real quality for it. Head-to-head detail in our GLM-5.2 vs DeepSeek V4 comparison.
• You just want the best model and licensing is irrelevant. Claude Opus 5.5 leads index v4.3.2 at 58, with the best open-weights score at 46. Nothing open matches it, and under the rebased index the gap is wider than it used to look.

The wider field, including Llama 4 and the long tail, is mapped in our open-source LLMs landscape.

What are GLM-5.2's limitations?

• No vision modality. Text in, text out. Multimodal pipelines still need a vision-capable model in the chain. Fast.ai co-founder Jeremy Howard, who assessed GLM-5.2 as "at least as good as Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5" for his own use in June 2026, named the missing vision support as the main gap.
• Token-hungry on long agent runs. 180M output tokens to complete Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index v4.3.2, versus 120M for MiniMax-M3. Cheap per token, expensive in wall-clock latency.
• It sometimes claims to be Claude. A well-documented quirk across GLM-series and other Chinese open-weights models. The common explanation is training-data contamination from Claude outputs, but no published technical audit confirms it. Harmless for code correctness — but do not build guardrails that depend on model self-identification.
• Thin first-party documentation. Z.ai shipped no benchmark report at launch and the numbers on its model card arrived later. Most technical detail in circulation still comes from third parties, which can be a procurement friction in regulated environments.
• Superseded on quality, and now on availability too. GLM-5.3 scores eleven index points higher on v4.3.2 (45 against 34) at identical per-token price, and its weights have been downloadable since 25 August 2026. GLM-5.2's remaining edge is its MIT license, not its capability.

FAQ

How many parameters does GLM-5.2 have?

GLM-5.2 has approximately 744 billion total parameters with about 40 billion active per token. It is a Mixture-of-Experts model with 256 routed experts plus one shared expert per sparse layer, selecting 8 routed experts per token across 78 transformer layers. Z.ai's model card and Artificial Analysis both round the total to 753B, and vLLM computes 743B / 39B from the config — the spread reflects different counting conventions for embedding and MTP parameters.

Is GLM-5.3 out?

Yes, and it is self-hostable. Z.ai launched GLM-5.3 on 14 August 2026 through its API and the GLM Coding Plan, then published the weights on 25 August 2026 at zai-org/GLM-5.3 following an extended safety review. GLM-5.3 is therefore the newest self-hostable GLM, scoring 45 on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index v4.3.2 against GLM-5.2's 34. The one reason to stay on 5.2 is licensing: 5.2 is MIT, while 5.3 ships under a custom "glm-5.3" license.

How much does GLM-5.2 cost?

The Z.ai metered API charges $1.40 per million input tokens, $0.26 per million cached input tokens, and $4.40 per million output tokens. The throughput-optimised GLM-5.2-Fast tier costs $2.29 input and $8.00 output for the same weights and identical quality. The GLM Coding Plan subscription starts at $18/month for the Lite tier and is usually cheaper for agent-heavy workloads.

Is GLM-5.2 open source?

The weights are published under the MIT license at zai-org/GLM-5.2 on Hugging Face, with no revenue thresholds and no regional restrictions on commercial use. The training code and a full technical report were not released, so "open weights" is the more precise description than "open source" in the strict OSI sense. An FP8 variant is also published as zai-org/GLM-5.2-FP8.

Can I run GLM-5.2 locally?

Yes, using quantised GGUF builds. Unsloth's 2-bit dynamic quant is 239 GB on disk and needs about 245 GB of combined RAM and VRAM, which fits a 256 GB unified-memory Mac or a single 24 GB GPU paired with 256 GB of system RAM. Expect 3–9 tokens per second on consumer hardware. Full BF16 at 1.51 TB requires server-class hardware, typically 8×H200 with FP8 weights.

GLM-5.2 vs DeepSeek V4 — which is better for coding?

It now depends on which measure you trust, and that changed when Artificial Analysis rebased its index. On general intelligence DeepSeek V4 Pro edges GLM-5.2 — 36 against 34 on Intelligence Index v4.3.2 (October 2026), reversing the 53-vs-44 gap the older v4.1.1 index showed. On long-horizon coding specifically, GLM-5.2 still leads on SWE-bench Pro and FrontierSWE. Both are MIT-licensed with 1M context, and DeepSeek V4 Pro is cheaper per index task ($0.67 against $1.47). Pick GLM-5.2 for agentic coding, DeepSeek V4 Pro for broader reasoning work, and DeepSeek V4 Flash when token spend dominates everything else.

What temperature should I use with GLM-5.2?

Use temperature 1.0. Z.ai's model card recommends 1.0 for both reasoning and general use, varying only top-p — 0.95 for reasoning-heavy prompts and 1.0 for general evaluation and coding. Lowering temperature to 0 or 0.2 out of GPT-era habit measurably degrades GLM-5.2's reasoning quality, because its post-training assumes full-entropy sampling.

What context window does GLM-5.2 support?

GLM-5.2 supports a native 1,048,576-token context window, five times GLM-5.1's 200K. Maximum output is 128K tokens through the Z.ai API. The window is made economically practical by DeepSeek Sparse Attention, which retains only the top 2,048 tokens per query, combined with IndexShare, which reuses the token-selection index across every four attention layers for a claimed 2.9× reduction in per-token FLOPs at full context.

Which GLM should you actually run?

The decision collapses to one question: do you need the weights on your own disk?

If you do not, use GLM-5.3 — same per-token price, eleven index points better on v4.3.2, and if you are on a Coding Plan you are already using it whether or not you changed your model string. If you do need the weights locally, the answer is narrower than it was in August. GLM-5.2 is the strongest MIT-licensed GLM you can download, with a 1M context window that makes retrieval layers optional for most codebases — but GLM-5.3's weights have been public since 25 August 2026 and score eleven points higher, and Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6-Pro is MIT and scores higher still. Stay on 5.2 only if MIT specifically is a hard procurement requirement, or if you have already validated it against your own repository and the index spread does not reflect your workload. Otherwise the base model is identical to 5.3, so migrating is a checkpoint swap rather than a re-architecture.

Standing GLM-5.2 up in production is mostly not a model problem. It is MoE-aware KV-cache tuning, expert-parallel sharding across a multi-GPU cluster, agent loops that use the 1M window without burning it, and evals that reflect your codebase rather than someone else's leaderboard. If you want senior engineers who have shipped self-hosted inference and agent stacks before, Codersera can extend your team.