GLM-5.3-Flash

Z.ai's first natively multimodal GLM-5 (text, image, and video understanding in one stack), released Aug 26 2026 and stealth-tested beforehand as 'ox-alpha'. A 320B-total / 18B-active MoE (45 layers, hybrid linear + sparse attention) with a 1M-token context window and MIT-licensed open weights (zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash). It is a distinct model from the text-only flagship GLM-5.3 (753B, $1.40/$4.40) and is priced roughly 10x cheaper on input: list $0.15 / $0.03 cached / $0.50 per Mtok, with a 50% promo through 2026-09-09. Vision sits inside the coding/agent loop (self-visual judgment) rather than as a bolted-on VL head. Self-reported vs GLM-5.2: DeepSWE 63.4 vs 46.2, AutomationBench 48.8 vs 26.2, Terminal-Bench 2.1 84.3 vs 81.0; vision self-reports include CharXiv Reasoning 89.4 and Chartography 78.0, though BabyVision 53.4 trails Gemini 3.7 Flash — all vendor numbers, unverified at launch. Thinking is always on and cannot be disabled.