All posts tagged: z.ai

Z.ai launches ZCode to challenge Cursor, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot in AI coding

Z.ai launches ZCode to challenge Cursor, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot in AI coding

Published by skeptic

Z.ai, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence lab formerly known as Zhipu AI, on Wednesday officially launched ZCode, a free desktop application it describes as an “Agentic Development Environment” purpose-built for its flagship GLM-5.2 large language model. The move marks the company’s most aggressive push yet into the fast-growing AI-powered coding tool market, where it now competes directly with Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Google’s Antigravity. “Introducing ZCode, the official development environment for GLM-5.2,” the company wrote on X, noting the tool is available on macOS, Windows, and Linux, supports bring-your-own-key (BYOK) configurations for third-party models, and offers a 1.5x usage-quota bonus for subscribers to its GLM Coding Plan. Read one way, ZCode is simply another entrant in a crowded market. Read another, it is a single product that crystallizes three of the most consequential trends in enterprise software today: the race-to-the-bottom pricing of frontier AI models, the geopolitical balkanization of the AI stack, and the rapid maturation of agentic coding agents into what Gartner now estimates is a roughly $10 billion market. An AI coding …

z.ai debuts faster, cheaper GLM-5 Turbo model for agents and ‘claws’ — but it’s not open-source

z.ai debuts faster, cheaper GLM-5 Turbo model for agents and ‘claws’ — but it’s not open-source

Published by skeptic

Chinese AI startup Z.ai, known for its powerful, open source GLM family of large language models (LLMs), has introduced GLM-5-Turbo, a new, proprietary variant of its open source GLM-5 model aimed at agent-driven workflows, with the company positioning it as a faster model tuned for OpenClaw-style tasks such as tool use, long-chain execution and persistent automation. It’s available now through Z.ai’s application programming interface (API) on third-party provider OpenRouter with roughly a 202.8K-token context window, 131.1K max output, and listed pricing of $0.96 per million input tokens and $3.20 per million output tokens. That makes it about $0.04 cheaper per total input and output cost (at 1 million tokens) than its predecessor, according to our calculations. Model Input Output Total Cost Source Grok 4.1 Fast $0.20 $0.50 $0.70 xAI Gemini 3 Flash $0.50 $3.00 $3.50 Google Kimi-K2.5 $0.60 $3.00 $3.60 Moonshot GLM-5-Turbo $0.96 $3.20 $4.16 OpenRouter GLM-5 $1.00 $3.20 $4.20 Z.ai Claude Haiku 4.5 $1.00 $5.00 $6.00 Anthropic Qwen3-Max $1.20 $6.00 $7.20 Alibaba Cloud Gemini 3 Pro $2.00 $12.00 $14.00 Google GPT-5.2 $1.75 $14.00 $15.75 …