Released August 14, 2026. Z.ai list pricing is $1.40/$4.40, the same rate as GLM-5.2; resellers discount from that list. Also available through the GLM Coding Plan from $18/mo. Reported GPQA Diamond 91.7% and Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index 59.5.
Huge agentic gains over GLM-5.2: Terminal-Bench 3.0 from 4.6 to 28.3, DeepSWE v1.1 from 46.2 to 66.9, SWE-Marathon v1.1 from 19.4 to 42.5
84.5% on CyberGym, narrowly ahead of Claude Mythos 5 at 83.8%; ExploitBench more than doubled from 24.4% to 54.4%
88.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 with a 1M token context window
Weaknesses
No published SWE-bench Verified score, so it is absent from the benchmark most buyers compare on
Priced identically to GLM-5.2 at $1.40/$4.40 — the upgrade is capability, not value
Real-world use cases
What people actually use GLM-5.3 for.
Long-horizon autonomous engineering tasks where GLM-5.2 ran out of headroom
Offensive and defensive security tooling — 84.5% on CyberGym, ahead of Claude Mythos 5
Self-hosted or coding-plan deployments that need frontier-adjacent quality at open-weights pricing
How GLM-5.3 compares
The nearest models people weigh against it, and what actually separates them.
vs GLM-5.2 — Against GLM-5.2 (Z.ai), GLM-5.3 lands within a few percent on price. Which one wins depends on whether context depth or latency is your constraint.
vs DeepSeek V4-Pro — Against DeepSeek V4-Pro (DeepSeek), GLM-5.3 costs about 78% more per token. DeepSeek V4-Pro is the one to check first if the price difference matters more than the ceiling.
vs DeepSeek V4-Flash — Against DeepSeek V4-Flash (DeepSeek), GLM-5.3 costs about 93% more per token and answers slower. DeepSeek V4-Flash is the one to check first if the price difference matters more than the ceiling.
Price History
GLM-5.3 pricing over time
→0% since Sep 1
7 data points · tracked daily since Sep 1, 2026
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Start using GLM-5.3
Agentic engineering and security work on open weights. Start free — no card required.
Z.ai's MIT-licensed open-weight flagship — the top open-weights coding model of mid-2026, beating GPT-5.5 on agentic coding benchmarks at roughly a sixth of the cost.
Verdict
Top open-weights coder — beats GPT-5.5 at a sixth of the cost.
Quality score
80%
Pricing
$1.40/1M in
$4.40/1M out
Speed
Balanced
3/5 speed
Context
1M tokens
Announced June 13, 2026; pay-per-token API live June 16. Two reasoning modes ('thinking' and 'max thinking'). GLM Coding Plan: Lite $18/mo (~$12.60 effective yearly), Pro $72, Max $160.
DeepSeek's 1.6T-parameter (49B active) MoE flagship with hybrid sparse attention — near-frontier coding and reasoning at roughly a tenth of closed-rival pricing, MIT-licensed open weights.
Verdict
Best open-weights flagship — near-frontier coding at a tenth of the price.
Quality score
82%
Pricing
$0.43/1M in
$0.87/1M out
Speed
Balanced
3/5 speed
Context
1M tokens
Open-weight preview April 24; GA ~July 20, 2026. Off-peak pricing verified on api-docs.deepseek.com; Beijing-business-hours surge doubles it. Legacy deepseek-chat/reasoner endpoints retired July 24, 2026.
A 284B-parameter (13B active) MoE workhorse re-post-trained for agentic and coding tasks — beats the V4-Pro preview on every published agent benchmark at ultra-commodity pricing.
Verdict
Best agentic capability per dollar in the directory.
Quality score
76%
Pricing
$0.14/1M in
$0.28/1M out
Speed
Fast
4/5 speed
Context
1M tokens
Official V4-Flash-0731 release July 31, 2026; weights on Hugging Face, API in public beta. Only DeepSeek model supporting the Responses API. DeepSeek has warned of a future price increase.
GLM-5.3 costs $1.4 per million input tokens and $4.4 per million output tokens on the API. A month of 10M input and 2M output tokens runs about $22.80 at list price, before any batch or caching discounts.
What is the context window of GLM-5.3?
GLM-5.3 has a 1M tokens context window, with up to 1M tokens of output per response. That is the total of prompt plus response the model can hold in one request.
What is GLM-5.3 best for?
GLM-5.3 is best for agentic engineering and security work on open weights. It is a strong fit when that workflow matters more than the tradeoffs around budget pricing and balanced speed.
When should I avoid GLM-5.3?
Your procurement process requires a SWE-bench Verified figure, or you need the closed-frontier reasoning ceiling.
What is a cheaper alternative to GLM-5.3?
DeepSeek V4-Pro (DeepSeek) at $0.43/1M/1M input against GLM-5.3's $1.40/1M/1M — roughly 78% less per token all in. Best open-weights flagship — near-frontier coding at a tenth of the price. Compare it first if GLM-5.3's pricing is the thing stopping you.
What is a faster alternative to GLM-5.3?
DeepSeek V4-Flash — fast against GLM-5.3's balanced, with 1M tokens of context. Worth the swap when response time is what your users notice rather than the last few points of reasoning depth.
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