Z.ai Releases GLM-5.3 as Open Model, Surpassing Claude and GPT in Tests
GLM-5.3's open release follows Z.ai's promise from August 14 and puts a model that outperforms Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol in third-party tests into the open-weight ecosystem.
Reporting from 1 source: GIGAZINE.
Z.ai released its GLM-5.3 model as an open model on August 29, 2026, at 0:00 Japan time. The MoE model has 744 billion total parameters and 40 billion active parameters. Third-party organization Artificial Analysis gave it an Intelligence Index score of 60 and an Agentic Index score of 59.
Z.ai delivered on its August 14 pledge to open up GLM-5.3 once security work finished. The model went live for download on Hugging Face and ModelScope under the GLM-5.3 License.
The architecture is a MoE design with 744 billion total parameters and 40 billion active parameters, which puts its compute demands at data-center scale. Unsloth has already posted a quantized GGUF version, and the UD-IQ2_M build can run on Macs with 256GB unified memory or PCs with 24GB VRAM and 256GB RAM.
Artificial Analysis scored the model 60 on its Intelligence Index, above Claude Opus 4.8, and 59 on its Agentic Index, above GPT-5.6 Sol and Grok 4.6. The smaller GLM-5.3-Flash was released as an open model on August 26.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.