What is GLM 5.2? The new Chinese AI model that’s rivalling Anthropic

Published on 03/07/2026 – 13:35 GMT+2•Updated
13:38

A new artificial intelligence model from China is catching up to other leading American AI models.

Called GLM 5.2, the company behind it, Z.ai, unleashed it just a day after the United States banned Anthropic from supplying its Fable 5 and Mythos models to non-Americans earlier this month, before the controls were lifted on June 30.

Z.ai claims that its model’s performance is almost on par with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5. It also operates on a 1 million token context window, meaning it can hold roughly 750,000 words in working memory at once.

GLM 5.2 is designed to run long coding tasks and maintains “quality across long, messy coding-agent trajectories,” the company said.

GLM-5.2 was tested on three benchmarks of long, complex coding work. On open-ended technical projects lasting hours to days, it trails Opus 4.8 by just 1% while edging past GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7, the company said.

On a test measuring how well it can improve smaller models using a single GPU, it beats both GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7, ranking second only to Opus 4.8.

On the toughest test marathon-length engineering tasks such as building compilers, it still trails Opus 4.8 by 13%, though it remains second-best overall, according to Z.ai. Across all three, GLM-5.2 is the leading open source model, according to the company.

The AI race

The Chinese model is also open source and has “no regional limits [and] technical access without borders,” the company notes. This means that the AI system can be modified for any purpose, including to change its output and share it for others to…

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