GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities

I bought $18 GLM official subscription yesterday (5.2, but new model version was already leaking on some docs), set it up with Claude Code harness... and I’ve bumped to $80 plan almost immediately. It’s the first model that agreed on a proper security research (red team scenario), executed it seamlessly, including 0-days in WP plugins, RCE, 6.8 kernel exploit adaptation, etc - while playing against another GLM agent as a defender (following HF story)!

I understand that such models can be used by malicious actors, but it’s fair to have it publicly available (and play on your side in case of emergency). This is what changes the world in a better way, I think, not the guardrails.

Apparently they are scanning OSS and popular software at scale and disclosing the vulnerabilities they found: https://cvd.z.ai/

Most of these are under embargo, but it seems there are a lot of CVE here from a wide range of popular software, many considered critical or high.

I understand the argument of "people are not actively looking", but isn't the cost for such a scan getting lower by the week, and Anthropic's Project Glasswing is supposed to find them quite a while ago?

This is absolutely still shy of Sol and Fable, but only just by a hair. Ridiculous results. There's still not a compelling economic reason to drop OpenAI courtesy of the ludicrous reset addiction that's taken place, but it feels like we're on the precipice.

How are you all toying with running this kind of thing in a mega quantized way locally? Two weeks out from released weights, but this is still just GLM 5.2 with post-training magic.

I might be just reading my positive bias into that text, but is it possible that it is written less like SV marketing hype trash and more like researchers wrote it?

It does feel like it respects both me and my time.

Thank you, Z.AI. Amazing what difference it makes when the top of your org are actual university professors.

> Mythos 5 remains well ahead at 181 and 247 tasks. The pattern across the three is consistent: the further up the exploitation chain a benchmark sits, the wider the remaining gap to the closed frontier. Capability is growing fastest exactly where we are furthest behind.

I appreciate they don't just take the opportunity to self-glaze.

Same image->html test as I showed in the Gemini 3.7 flash thread. Note that GLM isn't multimodal, but it still was able to generate something similar-ish by writing a python script to inspect the image and extract elements from it.

Original images: https://image.non.io/neonRamenDesigns.webp

GLM 5.3 build: https://html.non.io/neonRamenGLM5.3

Opus 5 build for comparison: https://html.non.io/neonRamen

For having no vision, it did a tremendous job. I'm pretty impressed it was able to extract so much detail.

The Opus one is still significantly better, but that's to be expected since it's multimodal. Curious to see where a future version from Z.ai lands on this.

> Scaling post-training is all we did for GLM-5.3.

Love this opening line. And wow, great results.

> As agent capability improves, much of the difficulty in scaling post-training moves from the model to the environment.

This will be roughly on pair with Kimi K3, but using a third of its parameters.

Just 4 weeks ago the "Kimi K3 moment" was seen as a threat to Closed AI and in less than a month Z.ai have cut the parameter/RAM barrier to a third.

Congratulation to Z.ai and all the hard working Chinese researchers who are quitely boiling the frog.

OpenAI and Anthropic need to just go ahead and give people access to the cyber models.

Otherwise we have a world of attackers using open and closed source models against a much smaller group of maintainers that are likely heavily dependent on Anthropic and OpenAI and for whom it may not be a simple matter to just get approval to start using the open model flavor of the month.

Apple will release M7 MacBook Pros / Mac Minis next year, and they will be able to run free LLMs locally at native speed. All software developer notebooks will be replaced to run local models, saving a lot by cancelling Claude Code subscriptions. Developers win. Apple stocks will be rocketing. Everything else will go down. You're welcome.

Missing multimodal again?

It is so valuable in practise to be able to have the models see screenshots - I guess if they aren't in the benchmarks then nobody will focus on it. But it completely nixes these for some of my main use cases.

Their coding plan switched to credits, didn’t it? What are the rate limits like, compared to Anthropic or Kimi K3?

I remember trying their Coding Plan out before the change and the 5 hour limits felt too restrictive then even for light/medium work, especially cause of the whole peak and off-peak thing: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model...

Nowadays, I’d probably go with their Max plan if the rate limits are okay? Anyone using them now?

Oh also unrelated but ZCode was surprisingly good, which is surprising for a tool that came out of nowhere - even some of the critiques in my blog post have been patched out. Sadly they don’t support using Claude Code as an agent so can’t use it like Paseo or Kepler or Agent Orchestrator.

Am I correct in understanding that this is just 730B-ish parameters as an MOE? That sounds like incredible performance per parameter. The new Deepseek was also very impressive with its 280B or so. Plus the most recent 30B-ish Qwen and Muse.

I find the performance to size ratio of these models to be way more interesting, selfishly because it makes me bullish on what I'll be able to run on a machine I own over the next few years. The progress is just incredible.

Feels like Fable's edge ended up just being long horizon task scaling, which post-training seems to achieve as seen here. Wonder what the next frontier is? Improvement in specialised tasks or computer use?

Google: Here is the next iteration of our flash model series, with a discount. please use. thx.

Z.ai: Here is our next iteration, neck and neck with Fable/Sol. weights releasing in two weeks.

GLM-5.3 is further proof that all >1T models are currently undertrained. I was looking at inteligence density ( https://www.pasteboard.co/6q2-5f92mtj9.png ) from recent open models (where parameters sizes are known) and taking DS-v4-flash as upper limit GLM-5.x can 3x its performance.

People familiar with the topic, how will models continue to get better? Post training it seems? Labs have already used up internet-scale data, so are there any limits to architecture improvements and post training or can we expect this trend to continue? ByteDance is training a 10T-parameter model. Here, GLM 5.3 outperforms models 3-4x its size of roughly 700B, so parameter count doesn’t seem to be a direct correlation anymore.

What a week for AI model releases

Such an interesting times we are in,

We just had amazing releases this past two months

kimi k3, glm5.3 qwen3.8 and now glm5.3

These open models are getting really good

dario must be writing another angry essay arguing why his closed model AI is too dangerous to be used by others.

> Open Source: We will release the weights in two weeks after launch, once safety evaluation and hardening are complete.

What safety evaluation? What safety hardening? They already evaluated it and found it to be highly capable at exploiting security vulnerabilities. So we know it is not "safe", and they don't seem to plan to do anything against it. What could be more dangerous than hacking? Biological weapons research? I don't think Chinese labs are doing anything against this either.

Love these open source models keeping close source models honest.

I’m using deepseek v4 flash to build a complex full stack production ai app and it’s a total beast.

I break out Claude when I hit some serious roadblocks, but that doesn’t seem to be happening much after the last deepseek flash release.

Deepseek prices just went up, but are still low.

I will def try GLM on my next project

It's a smart model, but it has huge troubles staying on task... it constantly builds things I didn't ask it to.

Might have its uses in a tightly controlled harness, but for coding I'm switching back to a mix of K3/GLM-5.2/Deepseek V4 Flash 0731

One htought I had; if The chinese allow unfettered access to cyber capabilties while th US does it's best to neuter it's model releases, from China's point of view they have the US all tied up in knots dealing with problems they don't give people the tools to solve. China giggles as it watches the US under threat from people using it's models. The US is restricting citizens from owning this particular kind of weapon, while China is handing it out to the wrolds citizens freely. It feels like the US would only come out worse overall?

Their own hardness (ZCode) seems to be a GUI, which doesn't work for me. They say they support other harnesses. However, it seems like I can inject the plan into other harnesses, like Claude Code[0]. Does anyone who's been using GLM models for a while have a strong feeling for if it does better in some harnesses than others, or should I just use my favourite harness?

0: https://docs.z.ai/devpack/tool/others

A flood of releases today, really difficult to make out for someone who does not use or test all these models on complex real world use cases as to how people decide which ones to use (besides price)

So is ‘cyber’ just short for ‘cybersecurity’/‘cyberwarfare’ now? That is not what cyber used to mean…

This is like when ‘crypto’ started meaning cryptocurrency.

just imagine the world without these open weight models - we'd probably have to reverse mortgage our homes to pay for tokens to those trillion $ companies to have access to their models.

In the past week, due to recent 'K3 moment', I tried both K3 and GLM 5.2. GLM worked better for me, faster and less verbose. Looking at the new improvements in 5.3, I can't wait to test it - this could be a real alternative to cc for me.

Musk: Open Chinese models will rival Fable 5 in Q1 2027

JieTang (Founder of Z.ai): It won't take that long

https://x.com/i/trending/2067626647050670400?lang=en

I was extremely impressed by GLM 5.2, although you could definitely _feel_ it was a bit behind Opus 4.8 at the time. Eager to see where GLM 5.3 is at.

These results look pretty good, given the smaller model size and the GLM family's historic robustness. Cheaper than Kimi and more robust than DeepSeek. The question in my mind is if you're going cheap, are you going to stop here or go all the way down to DeepSeek Flash?

Is there a plan somewhere that gives access to Kimi K3 and GLM-5.3? I was thinking of testing both to run security reviews of my code.

I know OpenCode Go has both, but their limits seem kinda low, so I'm not sure how feasible it is to run such a task with them.

They just ignore in their benchmarks opus 5 for some reason :) also grok 4.6 . I wonder why

I'm so glad I managed to get their subscription when it was on sale for 250 bucks a year back when it was 5.1. Back then it was just ok, but after 5.2, it's become my main workhorse. And 5.3 is looking fantastic.

No Hugging Face link yet. I wish they would release it under a true FOSS license.

Kimi and QWEN are now moving on to a restricted-usage license, which, although is still better than the proprietary American models, is a step back from the open source Chinese LLM culture.

Yeah Sonnet 5 feels drastically better.