GLM

Z.ai is Zhipu AI’s international developer platform, offering access to the GLM model family — including GLM-5.1, the first open-weight model to top the SWE-bench Pro leaderboard — via OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic-compatible APIs. Coding Plan subscriptions start at $10/month, making it the cheapest frontier-adjacent coding setup available in 2026. What Is Z.ai? Zhipu AI’s International Developer Platform Explained Z.ai is the international-facing developer API platform operated by Zhipu AI, a Beijing-based AI lab founded in 2019 as a spinout from Tsinghua University. The platform exposes Zhipu’s GLM (General Language Model) series to developers worldwide through two API compatibility layers: an OpenAI-compatible endpoint at https://api.z.ai/api/openai/v1 and an Anthropic-compatible endpoint at https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic — making Z.ai the only provider besides Anthropic itself that offers a true Anthropic API drop-in replacement. Zhipu AI trained the GLM models without Nvidia hardware, a geopolitical differentiator as export restrictions tighten in 2026. The platform offers free models (GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.5-Flash) for prototyping, quota-based Coding Plan subscriptions for Claude Code users, and direct per-token billing for production workloads. As of May 2026, GLM-5.1 scores 58.4% on SWE-bench Pro, edging out GPT-5.4 (57.7%) and Claude Opus 4.6 (57.3%). For developers who need frontier-adjacent coding performance without the $200/month Claude Max bill, Z.ai is the most cost-effective path. ...