Z.ai (formerly Zhipu AI) released GLM-4.7 on December 22, marking the latest upgrade to its General Language Model series. The Beijing-based company is positioning it as a coding-focused model that slots directly into agentic workflows, with native support for Claude Code, Cline, Roo Code, and Kilo Code.
The benchmark numbers, reported by Z.ai, show meaningful jumps over the previous GLM-4.6: 73.8% on SWE-bench Verified (up 5.8 points), 66.7% on SWE-bench Multilingual (up 12.9 points), and 42.8% on the Humanity's Last Exam benchmark with tools enabled (up 12.4 points). That HLE score puts it within striking distance of GPT-5.1, per Z.ai's own comparison tables. Independent verification is pending.
The model introduces what Z.ai calls "Preserved Thinking," where reasoning chains carry across multi-turn conversations rather than regenerating from scratch. Combined with a 200K context window and 128K max output, the pitch is clear: longer coding sessions with less context loss.
API pricing sits at $0.60 per million input tokens and $2.20 per million output, with cached input dropping to $0.11. For developers already using the GLM Coding Plan ($3/month), access is automatic. Model weights are available on Hugging Face under the MIT license, though local deployment demands serious hardware: the quantized version still needs around 130GB of VRAM for full GPU offloading.
Z.ai has been on the U.S. Commerce Department's Entity List since January 2025, which complicates its international expansion. Still, the company continues pushing global availability through its Z.ai platform and OpenRouter.
The Bottom Line: GLM-4.7 offers competitive benchmark performance at roughly one-third the price of Claude Sonnet 4.5, with open weights for self-hosting, but the numbers are self-reported and await third-party validation.
QUICK FACTS
- SWE-bench Verified: 73.8% (company-reported)
- HLE with tools: 42.8% (company-reported)
- Context window: 200K tokens
- API pricing: $0.60 input / $2.20 output per 1M tokens
- License: MIT (open weights on Hugging Face)
- Release date: December 22, 2025
