The Known Good Updated 25 Jul 2026
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Z.ai: GLM 5 ·Anthropic vs Z.ai

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Z.ai: GLM 5 — head-to-head comparison

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 profile Z.ai: GLM 5 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 — Z.ai
Quality
#19 of 61
77based on 4 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#214 of 316
37.6
Output tokens per second
Price
#217 of 340
$1.35
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.95 · Out $2.55
Cache hit price
#138 of 206
$0.20
per 1M tokens (−79%)
Context
#189 of 345
205k
tokens (~300 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores 80 and Z.ai: GLM 5 scores 77 — a 3-point lead for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6. They share 4 published evaluations, with Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 ahead on 3 and Z.ai: GLM 5 ahead on 1.

Blended pricing is $6.00 per 1M tokens for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 and $1.35 for Z.ai: GLM 5 — Z.ai: GLM 5 is about 4.4× cheaper.

Throughput is 41 tokens per second for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 and 38 for Z.ai: GLM 5, with time to first token at 1.6s and 2.5s. Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 accepts 1.00M tokens of context against 205k.

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 is proprietary; Z.ai: GLM 5 is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted). 17 tracked hosts serve one or both, and 1 serve 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
Known Good Index 80 based on 4 of 6 evaluations 77 based on 4 of 6 evaluations
Blended $/1M $6.00 $1.35
Output tok/s 41 38
Context window 1.00M 205k
Providers 4 14
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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
Known Good Index 80 77
Coding Index 71 67
Mathematics Index 86 80
Science Index 91 92
Agentic Index 71 67
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 · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond87 / 88
MATH / AIME86 / 80
SWE-bench Verified75 / 72
Terminal-Bench53 / 52

Right-hand figures read Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 / Z.ai: GLM 5. Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads on 3 of 4, Z.ai: GLM 5 on 1.

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
Text Arena 1,458 1,445
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,473 1,457
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
Input $/1M $3.00 $0.95
Output $/1M $15.00 $2.55
Blended $/1M $6.00 $1.35
Cache read $/1M $0.300 $0.200
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
Context window 1.00M 205k
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
Output tokens/s 41 38
Time to first token 1.6s 2.5s
The Known Good

Providers

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

17 hosts · 1 serve both
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 blendedAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 tok/s Z.ai: GLM 5 blendedZ.ai: GLM 5 tok/s
Google · first party $6.00 41
Amazon Bedrock · first party $6.00 38 $1.55 116
Anthropic · first party $6.00 37
Azure · first party $6.00 26
GMICloud $0.93 60
Phala $1.77 57
Chutes $1.35 49
Venice $1.55 40
Baidu · first party $1.08 39
Parasail $1.55 39
AtlasCloud $1.50 36
Novita $1.55 36
StreamLake $0.93 36
Z.AI · first party $1.55 33
SiliconFlow $1.35 30
DeepInfra $0.97 29
DigitalOcean $1.16 8

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 →