Z.ai: GLM 4.5 Air
Z.ai GLM 4.5 Air offers impressive benchmark scores for its price tier — particularly in math and coding — with strong agentic capability and tool use support at a very competitive cost, making it excellent value for technical business workflows.
Assessment date: March 12, 2026
Our methodology takes into account a range of factors including pricing, functionality, capabilities, benchmark performance, and real-world applicability. Rankings are reviewed and updated regularly as new models are released. Issues with our rankings? Contact us
GLM-4.5-Air is the lightweight variant of our latest flagship model family, also purpose-built for agent-centric applications. Like GLM-4.5, it adopts the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture but with a more compact parameter size. GLM-4.5-Air also supports hybrid inference modes, offering a "thinking mode" for advanced reasoning and tool use, and a "non-thinking mode" for real-time interaction. Users can control the reasoning behaviour with the reasoning enabled boolean. Learn more in our docs
Capabilities
Architecture
| Modality | Text → Text |
| Tokenizer | Other |
Performance Indices
Source: Artificial Analysis
Benchmark Scores
Evaluations
Benchmark data from Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face
Model Information
Pricing
| Token Type | Cost per 1M tokens | Cost per 1K tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.13 | $0.000130 |
| Output | $0.85 | $0.000850 |
Live Performance
Live endpoint metrics — refreshed every 30 minutes.
External Resources
Data sourced from OpenRouter API, Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard. Scores are editorially curated by our team.
Last updated: March 13, 2026 7:52 pm