Chinese Z.ai launches ZCode, challenges Cursor and Claude Code
Zhipu, the Chinese maker of Z.ai and the underlying GLM LLM, is releasing development software that will compete with Claude Code, Google Antigravity IDE and xAI’s Cursor.
The launch of ZCode is a sign of the international focus of Chinese LLMs, which are gaining interest among developers. On the one hand because of their lower pricing, on the other because these models often have open weights or are open source. The American LLMs are not, which makes their users more dependent.
Zhipu calls ZCode the official development environment for its brand-new open source model GLM version 5.2. However, GLM-5.2 is text-only. Handy for questions with a large context, coding, reasoning, streaming and function calling. Reading or generating images is not possible. Z.ai is available for Western use.
The creators position GLM-5 themselves not as the very strongest across the board, but as the best open source model for reasoning, coding and agentic tasks. They are narrowing the gap with closed-source models such as Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.2.
In the world of corporate AI users, being able to offer lower prices to heavy users is no small matter.
According to market research firm Gartner, by 2028 the costs of AI-driven programming will exceed the average salary of a developer.
US news site 404 Media confirmed that picture, as it has heard from sources at Atlassian, Adobe, Amazon and Citi that employees have been told to use AI more consciously (read: more sparingly). Otherwise it becomes too expensive.
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