Businesses are increasingly adopting cheaper Chinese open-weight models like Zhipu's GLM-5.2, which costs one-fifth of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8, for near-frontier performance. Since mid-June, GLM-5.2's daily token volume on Vercel, a cloud platform for AI web development, has surged 50-fold.
Chinese open-weight models are gaining significant enterprise adoption by offering competitive performance at a fraction of the cost, pressuring US frontier model pricing.