Is GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI) Down?

Quickest ways to check the current status of z.ai plus recent known issues and working alternatives if it's out.

Last editorial review: 2026-07-09

How to check right now

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Step 2 -- Crowdsourced reports
DownDetector: GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI)→

User-reported outages aggregated across regions. Good signal for partial or regional outages.

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Live tweets from other users. Fastest signal for a fresh outage -- often beats status pages by 10-20 minutes.

Step 4 -- Official status page
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Known issues we've tracked

ZCODE HARNESS LAUNCHED (2026-07-02, press-verified): Zhipu released **ZCode**, an agentic-coding harness for GLM-5.2 that lets developers build autonomous coding assistants on the model -- an explicit shot at Anthropic's Claude Code, leaning on developer frustration with Anthropic's recent access restrictions and Zhipu's open-weights positioning. Launch incentives: **5 million free tokens for new ZCode users** and a 50% data-quota boost for existing subscribers. Open-source status implied but not explicitly confirmed -- verify the repo/license before building on it. Strategically this completes the GLM-5.2 story: MIT-licensed frontier weights + a first-party harness = a full Claude Code substitute stack from one Chinese lab
2026-07-02•SCMP (scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3359170, 2026-07-02)
INDEPENDENT BENCHMARK PUBLISHED (verified 2026-07-04): Artificial Analysis now has a citable independent eval for GLM-5.2 -- **Intelligence Index = 51, ranked #1 of 93 open-weight models** (artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-2), corroborating the vendor's 'tops the open-weights index' claim with a third-party number. Keep the Zhipu-reported figures (SWE-Bench Pro 62.1%, Terminal-Bench 2.1 81.0%) labeled as vendor benchmarks -- the AA-51 is the independently-measured one to lead with.
2026-07-04•Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-2), Crypto Briefing
MODEL LAUNCH (2026-06-13): **GLM-5.2** -- Z.ai's new open-weights flagship 'for long-horizon tasks', a substantial leap over GLM-5.1. ~753B-parameter MoE, MIT licensed, with a 1M-token context that sustains long-horizon work and the new **IndexShare** sparse-attention architecture that cuts per-token FLOPs ~2.9x at 1M-token context. Vendor-published benchmarks (third-party verification still settling): SWE-Bench Pro 62.1, GPQA-Diamond ~91.2, AIME 2026 ~99.2, HLE reasoning ~40.5. It tops the Artificial Analysis open-weights Intelligence Index, and VentureBeat reports it beats GPT-5.5 on several long-horizon coding benchmarks at roughly 1/6 the cost. MIT weights shipped to Hugging Face (zai-org/GLM-5.2) and ModelScope; works as a drop-in coding backend for Claude Code, Cline, and OpenCode. Note: exact active-parameter count for 5.2 was not published in the model card -- treat the MoE-active figure as unconfirmed pending a vendor spec sheet.
2026-06-13•Hugging Face zai-org/GLM-5.2 model card, VentureBeat (z-ais-open-weights-glm-5-2-beats-gpt-5-5...), z.ai/blog/glm-5.2
GLM-4.6 requires specific tokenizer and chat template -- several community llama.cpp quants initially had broken tool-use until fixes landed
2026-03•Hugging Face discussions, GitHub issues
Refuses discussion of Tiananmen, Taiwan, Xi Jinping -- same PRC content filters as DeepSeek and Qwen
2026-02•Reddit r/LocalLLaMA

Issues here are sourced from our editorial sweeps, not real-time telemetry. Newer issues may exist.

What to use if GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI) is down

Top AIToolTier-ranked alternatives in the same category, ordered by our overall score.

A

Qwen (Alibaba)

8.8

Alibaba's open-weights + API family -- Qwen3.8-Max flagship previewed at WAIC (Jul 19 2026: 2.4T sparse-MoE multimodal, closed preview, 'second only to Fable 5'), Qwen 3.7 Max GA (SWE-Bench Pro 60.6%, Terminal-Bench 69.7%, $2.50/$7.50 per 1M), Qwen3.6-27B dense Apache 2.0 (beats the 397B MoE on coding from one consumer GPU)

A

MiniMax M3

8.4

MiniMax's coding/agent flagship -- M3 (June 1 2026): 1M-token context, MSA sparse attention (>15x decoding speedup at long context), SWE-Bench Pro 59.0%, Terminal-Bench 66.0%. OPEN WEIGHTS LIVE on HuggingFace since June 12 (~428B total / ~23B active, native multimodal, minimax-community license)

A

Gemma 4 (Google)

8.3

Google DeepMind's open-weights model family -- multimodal, 256K context, runs on edge devices

A

IBM Granite 4.0

8.2

IBM's enterprise-focused open-weight family -- Granite 4.0 hybrid Mamba-2 + transformer architecture (70-80% memory reduction vs pure transformer), 3B to 32B sizes, Apache 2.0. First open model family to secure ISO 42001 certification. Nano 350M runs on CPU with 8-16GB RAM. 3B Vision variant landed 2026-04-01

A

Kimi K3 (Moonshot)

8.1

Moonshot's 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 (launched 2026-07-16/17) is the largest open-weight model ever announced -- 1M context, multimodal, $3/$15 per 1M via API, ranked best-available on Arena.AI at launch. Weights promised late July (press cites 7/27); K2.6/K2.7-Code remain the shipped-weights line

About GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI)

Tier A (8.0/10). Zhipu AI's open-weights flagship -- GLM-5.2 (launched 2026-06-13) is a ~753B-parameter MoE with a 1M-token context and the new IndexShare sparse-attention architecture (~2.9x lower per-token FLOPs at 1M context), MIT licensed. Vendor benchmarks put SWE-Bench Pro at 62.1 (up from GLM-5.1's 58.4) and it tops the Artificial Analysis open-weights Intelligence Index; VentureBeat reports it beats GPT-5.5 on several long-horizon coding benchmarks at roughly 1/6 the cost. Drop-in for Claude Code / Cline / OpenCode. Still trained outside the Nvidia stack on Huawei Ascend silicon

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