GPT · China · Open Source · Decrypt
China's Z.AI Ships GLM-5.3, Calling It the Top Open-Weight Coding Model
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Chinese AI lab Z.ai released GLM-5.3 on Thursday, a sizable coding model it's pitching as the strongest open-weights coder on the market.
Key facts
- That stacks against GPT-5.3-Codex at $1.75 / $14 and Claude Opus 4.8 near the top of Anthropic's tiers
- Z.ai says GLM-5.3 clears 34.5% on its in-house Z.ai Code Bench at Max effort while burning roughly 75,000 output tokens per task, against GLM-5.2's 23.4% at 96,000
- On Terminal Bench 3.0—a test of autonomous shell/tool use in real Linux environments—GLM-5.3 scores 28.3, slightly behind closed models Fable 5 (33.7) and GPT-5.6 Sol (34.6)
- GLM-5.3 leads CyberGym at 84.5% and more than doubles GLM-5.2 on exploitation benchmarks
Summary
Zhipu AI (now Z.ai) released GLM-5.3 on Thursday through its GLM Coding Plan and ZCode. The lab calls it the "most capable open-weights model for coding,". GLM-5.3 is a 743-billion-parameter model built by scaling post-training on the GLM-5.2 base. "Scaling post-training is all we did for GLM-5.3," the company wrote in its launch post.