GLM-5.2: The Strongest Open-Weight Coder of 2026
Zhipu's MIT-licensed, 1M-context flagship tops open-weight coding benchmarks. Here's what's verified, where it stands, and what you can use on QCode today.
GLM-5.2 is now listed on QCode /models as glm-5.2. The MIT open weights are unchanged. Older copy on this page said we had no capacity — that is stale. Live stock is whatever /models shows.
GLM-5.2 at a glance
MIT-licensed on Hugging Face (zai-org/GLM-5.2) — self-hostable.
A one-million-token window, four times the prior generation.
Mixture-of-experts: 256 experts, 8 active per token (~40B active).
Top open-weight model on coding and agent benchmarks — still behind Claude Opus 4.8.
Verified benchmarks
Official numbers from Zhipu's release — strong, but read them in context.
Official figures from Zhipu's release. SWE-bench Pro 62.1 edges GPT-5.5 (58.6). Note that SWE-bench Verified and Code Arena scores were not officially published — ignore fabricated numbers — and GLM-5.2 still trails Claude Opus 4.8 overall, so 'strongest open weight' is the accurate framing. Intelligence Index 51 is third-party (Artificial Analysis).
Open weights vs cloud API
Two ways to run GLM-5.2 — with very different trade-offs.
Self-host the open weights
The MIT license lets you run GLM-5.2 on your own hardware — but a 753B MoE model needs serious compute and engineering.
Vendor cloud API
Fastest to start, but launch week saw heavy rate-limiting, and routing data through a China-based provider carries compliance considerations for regulated workloads.
Where QCode stands on GLM-5.2
GLM-5.2 is now on QCode /models. It remains the MIT open-weight flagship (~1M context). Route production traffic against the live catalog; vendor benches on this page are still from the launch tables.
What you can use on QCode today
Production-ready models, available now through one key.
Claude Opus 4.8
Top-tier agentic coding.
Codex (GPT-5.5)
Terminal-native agentic workflows.
Gemini 3 Pro / 3.5 Flash
1M-context reasoning, fast multimodal.
Frequently asked questions
Is GLM-5.2 available on QCode?
Yes. QCode /models currently lists glm-5.2. The old “not currently” answer was about launch-week capacity and is out of date.
Is GLM-5.2 really the best coding model?
It's the strongest open-weight model — SWE-bench Pro 62.1, ahead of GPT-5.5 — but it still trails Claude Opus 4.8 among proprietary leaders. 'Best open weight' is accurate; 'best overall' is not.
Can I self-host GLM-5.2?
Yes — the weights are MIT-licensed on Hugging Face. But it's a 753B mixture-of-experts model, so self-hosting needs substantial GPU capacity and engineering.
Is GLM-5.2 free?
The open weights are free under MIT. Hosted API access is paid — third-party aggregators list around $0.95 / $3 per million input/output tokens — and was heavily rate-limited at launch.
Use a production-ready model today
One plan from $8.57/mo covers Claude, Codex and Gemini — and we'll tell you here if GLM-5.2 ever joins the lineup.