AI joins the 8-hour work day as GLM ships 5.1 open source LLM, beating Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 on SWE-Bench Pro

Is China picking back up the open source AI baton?

Z.ai, also known as Zhupai AI, a Chinese AI startup best known for its powerful, open source GLM family of models, has unveiled GLM-5.1 today under a permissive MIT License, allowing for enterprises to download, customize and use it for commercial purposes. They can do so on Hugging Face.

This follows its release of GLM-5 Turbo, a faster version, under only proprietary license last month.

The new GLM-5.1 is designed to work autonomously for up to eight hours on a single task, marking a definitive shift from vibe coding to agentic engineering.

The release represents a pivotal moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence. While competitors have focused on increasing reasoning tokens for better logic, Z.ai is optimizing for productive horizons.

GLM-5.1 is a 754-billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model engineered to maintain goal alignment over extended ...