Intelligence
23.2
23
General reasoning and benchmark headroom.
LimitedZ.ai: GLM 4.5 Air is a budget text-first model from z-ai with a fast runtime profile, extended context posture, and the clearest fit around long-context research / agent workflows.
Benchmark blend
Dev workflow signal
Extended
Budget tier
Z.ai: GLM 4.5 Air currently reads as a budget text-first option with extended context and a fast runtime profile.
Decision Strip
Core buy-side signals stay in one pass. The rest of the page expands only after intelligence, speed, context, and price are clear.
General reasoning and benchmark headroom.
LimitedTTFT 0.70s
Above averageHow much prompt and task state can stay in view.
Competitive$1.10 output / 1M
EfficientEditorial Profile
Positioning, tradeoffs, and fit are consolidated into one read instead of repeating the same story across separate cards.
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](https://openrouter.ai/docs/use-cases/reasoning-tokens#enable-reasoning-with-default-config)
z-ai text-first profile
Long-context research / Agent workflows with extended context and fast runtime.
Efficient spend profile. More comfortable for sustained prompt volume if the capability fit is right.
Large context headroom supports repo-wide prompts and long research sessions.
Latency and throughput look responsive enough for interactive loops.
Budget-friendly input pricing is a strength, but raw capability may vary by workload.
Current metadata points to a text-first profile rather than a broad multimodal one.
Long-context summarization, repo analysis, and policy or document review.
Benchmarks
Only benchmark categories with actual signal are shown. Secondary values stay as simple definitions instead of nested micro-cards.
Broad reasoning, knowledge depth, and flagship benchmark posture.
Software implementation, debugging quality, and coding benchmark signal.
Formal reasoning, structured problem solving, and competition-style math.
Long-horizon execution quality and interactive benchmark evidence.
Specs & Pricing
Specs stay neutral, pricing gets emphasis through values rather than extra containers. Raw provider internals remain in metadata at the end.
This model is relatively efficient on price. It is the easier fit when sustained prompt volume matters.
Metadata
Verification details remain available, but the page no longer forces them ahead of the editorial read.