Z.ai

The Chinese AI lab behind the GLM family of open-weight models (formerly known as Zhipu AI). Z.ai sits with deepseek, qwen (Alibaba), and Moonshot (Kimi) in the open-weight challenger position of the provider map: Chinese labs shipping downloadable weights that lead on cost-per-quality rather than the proprietary reasoning frontier.

Its current flagship GLM-5.2 (MIT-licensed, 753B-A40B MoE, text-only) is — as of June 2026 — the #1 open-weight model on Artificial Analysis‘s Intelligence Index, evidence that the open field’s lead is no longer DeepSeek/Qwen alone. Z.ai runs a dual model line: a text-only GLM track plus separate vision/multimodal models, so the text flagship can stay focused.

Tier & provenance

Provider node assembled from the glm-52 ingest (simon-willison‘s review, T2) plus prior plain mentions in open-weight-models and llm-provider. No first-party Z.ai source ingested yet — a Z.ai model-card or release page would be the highest-value next source to firm this up.

Related

glm-52 · open-weight-models · llm-provider · deepseek · qwen