China’s Low-Priced Z.ai Model Is Exposing Costly Coder Habits

Zain Hasan , an AI engineer at Together AI , has taught himself to use AI coding assistants while still keeping an eye on cost. He directs difficult problems to a frontier model, meaning one near the current state of the art in reasoning and capability, such as Anthropic’s Fable . But if the task that Hasan is outsourcing is more straightforward, he directs it to a less capable—and less expensive—language model. Right now, the cheaper model, for him, tends to be GLM 5.2. Released on 16 June by the Beijing-based lab Z.ai , GLM 5.2 is an open-weights model , meaning any organization with sufficient hardware can download and host the model for free. Those that pay Z.ai for GLM access still can save money, because the company’s API costs $4.40 per million output tokens . That’s less than a fifth of the comparable price for access to Anthropic’s…