The Known Good Updated 25 Jul 2026
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Z.ai: GLM 5.2 ·Anthropic vs Z.ai

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Z.ai: GLM 5.2 — head-to-head comparison

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 profile Z.ai: GLM 5.2 profile All comparisons
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 — Anthropic
Quality
#17 of 61
80based on 4 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#198 of 316
40.9
Output tokens per second
Price
#301 of 340
$6.00
Blended per 1M tokens
In $3.00 · Out $15.00
Cache hit price
#165 of 206
$0.30
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#55 of 345
1.00M
tokens (~1,500 pages)
Z.ai: GLM 5.2 — Z.ai
Quality
#8 of 61
91based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#147 of 316
55.2
Output tokens per second
Price
#204 of 340
$1.12
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.73 · Out $2.28
Cache hit price
#116 of 206
$0.13
per 1M tokens (−81%)
Context
#45 of 345
1.05M
tokens (~1,600 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores 80 and Z.ai: GLM 5.2 scores 91 — a 12-point lead for Z.ai: GLM 5.2. They share 3 published evaluations, with Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 ahead on 0 and Z.ai: GLM 5.2 ahead on 3.

Blended pricing is $6.00 per 1M tokens for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 and $1.12 for Z.ai: GLM 5.2 — Z.ai: GLM 5.2 is about 5.4× cheaper.

Throughput is 41 tokens per second for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 and 55 for Z.ai: GLM 5.2, with time to first token at 1.6s and 1.7s. Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 accepts 1.00M tokens of context against 1.05M.

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 is proprietary; Z.ai: GLM 5.2 is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted). 33 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 26 Jul 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6Z.ai: GLM 5.2
Known Good Index 80 based on 4 of 6 evaluations 91 based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Blended $/1M $6.00 $1.12
Output tok/s 41 55
Context window 1.00M 1.05M
Providers 4 29
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

IndicesComponents
Index scores

Each index is min-max normalised across tracked models and scaled 0–100 from published evaluations. We do not run these evaluations.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6Z.ai: GLM 5.2
Known Good Index 80 91
Coding Index 71
Mathematics Index 86 86
Science Index 91 97
Agentic Index 71 91
Openness Index 5 60
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 · marker = Z.ai: GLM 5.2 · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond87 / 92
MATH / AIME86 / 86
SWE-bench Verified75 / 79

Right-hand figures read Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 / Z.ai: GLM 5.2. Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads on 0 of 3, Z.ai: GLM 5.2 on 3.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Arena ratings

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena. Higher is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6Z.ai: GLM 5.2
Text Arena 1,458 1,464
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,473 1,469
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Per token typeCache discount
Published pricing

USD per 1M tokens. Blended is a 3:1 input:output mix. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6Z.ai: GLM 5.2
Input $/1M $3.00 $0.73
Output $/1M $15.00 $2.28
Blended $/1M $6.00 $1.12
Cache read $/1M $0.300 $0.135
The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input accepted and maximum output emitted

Context and output limits

Provider-declared limits, from metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6Z.ai: GLM 5.2
Context window 1.00M 1.05M
Max output tokens 128k 131k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Median throughput and time to first token across hosting providers

Output speedTime to first token
Throughput and latency

Medians across all tracked providers, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6Z.ai: GLM 5.2
Output tokens/s 41 55
Time to first token 1.6s 1.7s
The Known Good

Providers

Which hosts serve each model, and at what price and speed

33 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 blendedAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 tok/s Z.ai: GLM 5.2 blendedZ.ai: GLM 5.2 tok/s
Google · first party $6.00 41
Amazon Bedrock · first party $6.00 38
Anthropic · first party $6.00 37
Azure · first party $6.00 26
CoreWeave $1.18 181
BaseTen $2.15 119
Wafer $2.15 103
Ionstream $2.15 101
Friendli $2.15 80
Cloudflare $2.15 74
Alibaba · first party $1.27 69
Fireworks $2.15 65
Decart $1.52 60
Chutes $1.93 56
Parasail $2.15 56
DeepInfra $1.45 49
Z.AI · first party $2.15 49
SiliconFlow $2.00 48
Together $2.15 47
AkashML $1.18 46
Phala $2.15 46
Morph $1.85 43
Baidu · first party $1.12 40
GMICloud $1.42 39
Venice $2.15 39
AtlasCloud $1.94 38
Novita $1.12 37
StreamLake $1.11 37
Inceptron $1.43 29
Io Net $4.40 29
Sail Research $1.72 20
Ambient $1.89 14
DigitalOcean $1.89 13

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. A dash means that host does not serve that model.

The Known Good
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Benchmarks — Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)Elo — Arena Full attribution →