GLM-5 Technical Report: Open-Source Model Built for Agentic Engineering

Feb 18, 2026 · Updated Apr 25, 2026

GLM-5, released by the z.ai team, is an open-source foundation model built for autonomous software engineering rather than simple code completion. Three innovations define it: Dynamic Sparse Attention (DSA) for cost-efficient long-context handling, an asynchronous RL infrastructure that decouples generation from training for faster post-training, and agent RL algorithms that teach the model to learn from complex multi-step interactions.

The result is state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on major benchmarks, with the biggest gains in real-world software engineering - end-to-end tasks requiring planning, writing, and iteration across a codebase.

For developers in the GLM ecosystem (z.ai runs a Claude Code-compatible API), GLM-5 is the next generation. The code, models, and full technical report are publicly available.

View the full update on arxiv.org

Z.ai

@Zai_orgFeb 18

Presenting the GLM-5 Technical Report! https://t.co/CGjxEISvFK After the launch of GLM-5, we’re pulling back the curtain on how it was built. Key innovations include: - DSA Adoption: Significantly reduces training and inference costs while preserving long-context fidelity - Asynchronous RL Infrastructure: Drastically improves post-training efficiency by decoupling generation from training - Agent RL Algorithms: Enables the model to learn from complex, long-horizon interactions more effectively Through these innovations, GLM-5 achieves SOTA performance among open-source models, with particularly strong results in real-world software engineering tasks.

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