Z.ai's GLM-5.2 is the open-weight model US export controls cannot touch

Z.ai released GLM-5.2, a 744B-parameter open-weight model under MIT license, one day after US export controls forced Anthropic to restrict foreign access to its frontier models. The model runs locally on consumer hardware, benchmarks competitively with US frontier models on specific tasks, and costs $1.40–$4.40 per million tokens via API—demonstrating that open-weight releases circumvent hardware-based export controls once weights are published.