Get the GLM-5.2 Honest Scorecard

China's Z.ai dropped GLM-5.2 — a free, open-weights model the headlines say beats GPT-5.5. Here's the honest scorecard. The truth is split: on the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index it's the #1 OPEN model on Earth (51) — but 4th overall, just behind Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. So it's not an outright GPT-5.5 killer — yet on GDPval, the test of real economically-valuable work, it ties GPT-5.5 (1524 vs 1514), and it runs at roughly 1/6th the API cost ($1.40 in / $4.40 out vs GPT-5.5's $5 / $30). Inside: the two-leaderboards table (open vs overall), every coding benchmark labeled by source (vendor-reported vs independent), the real cost math plus the catch (it's verbose — ~43K output tokens/task), the local-vs-API data-risk decision that actually keeps your code private, and a copy-paste 4-step setup to run GLM-5.2 inside Claude Code, OpenCode or ZCode. Don't buy the hype — buy the breakthrough underneath it.

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