A Chinese lab just dropped an open model that goes toe to toe with Claude on coding and costs a 5th of the price.


It’s called GLM-5.2 and it came out June 13. MIT license so anyone can download it, run it, tweak it and build a business on it. There’s no API key, gatekeeper or monthly bill.
The benchmarks:
→ within a few points of Claude Opus 4.8 on agentic coding
→ beats GPT-5.5 on real pull request work
→ ranked #1 on the main frontend design board, ahead of every Claude model, voted by actual devs in blind tests
Now the cost.
Same knowledge work task, 3 models:
→ GLM-5.2: $2.40
→ Claude Opus: $10.40
→ Claude’s top tier: $31
Identical job for a tenth of the price.
China is handing near frontier models to the entire planet for free and saying go build.
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