Across the internet people have started talking about the emergence of a Chinese competitor to Claude. This is the GLM-5.2 neural network from the company Z.ai. Enthusiasts compare the newcomer with Anthropic's top products. For example, crypto blogger 0xMarioNawfal claimed that GLM-5.2 surpasses Claude in a number of scenarios at a price ten times lower. According to him, users began en masse switching to it just a few days after the release.

The BeInCrypto editorial team gathered information about the neural network's capabilities and user reviews into a single overview. We explain whether the new Chinese model is really better than Claude.

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What GLM-5.2 is and why it is interesting

The developers created GLM-5.2 as a flagship model tuned for productive working sessions. The AI agent is able to carry out a complex project in parts without loss of quality. The main difference from its predecessor GLM-5.1 lies in a stable context window of 1 million tokens instead of the former 200 thousand. It is precisely the size of the context that determines how much text and code the model keeps in view at the same time.

Key features of the model:

• A context of 1 million tokens that does not degrade during ultra-long sessions, thanks to which the entire code base fits into a single reasoning cycle.
• Two levels of reasoning effort: High for a balance of productivity and token consumption, as well as Max for maximum capabilities at the cost of greater consumption.
• An open MIT license without regional restrictions, allowing self-hosting, that is, running on one's own hardware.
• The price of accessing the model via the API, which has remained at the level of the previous version GLM-5.1.

The model parameters are posted on the HuggingFace and ModelScope platforms. Local launch is supported by the transformers, vLLM, SGLang, xLLM and ktransformers frameworks. Access is also opened through the GLM Coding Plan subscription, the ZCode desktop agent, as well as the Claude Code and OpenCode environments.

What the benchmarks show

According to Z.ai's own tests, GLM-5.2 is recognized as the strongest open model on the market. However, in most cases it falls short of Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8.

Source: BeInCrypto