Beijing-based AI startup Z.ai has launched GLM-4.6, its new flagship model with improved coding abilities.

The company, formerly known as Zhipu, wants to strengthen its position in the competitive AI coding agent sector.

Z.ai said GLM-4.6 outperforms its previous GLM-4.5 but still lags behind Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 in coding benchmarks.

The model has a 200,000-token context window and costs US$0.6 million per 1 million input tokens and US$2 million per 1 million output tokens on OpenRouter, cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.5.

GLM-4.6 is available on Hugging Face and ModelScope, though Z.ai will not release a smaller “Air” version.

Founded in 2019 by Tsinghua professors, the company is preparing for a mainland China IPO.

🔗 Source: South China Morning Post