Chat Z.AI (GLM-5) in 2026: The Chinese Model That Pretends to Be Claude
25 min read
On February 6, 2026, an anonymous model called “Pony Alpha” showed up on OpenRouter – free, with no word on who built it. The AI community immediately started trying to work out who did. Its coding skills came close to Claude Opus 4.5. Ask it “who are you?” and it answered “I am GLM.” But ask it to build a web page describing itself, and it wrote: “I am Claude, created by Anthropic.”
That happened every single time. And it frames everything you need to know about GLM-5 before we get to benchmarks and pricing.
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