GLM-5.1 exists at 1/5 of the price of Opus (a Chinese open source model), and is almost as good as Opus. Organisations use Opus anyway, because it's only $200/mo. (To me GLM looks to be worse in some areas like finding bugs and making complex decisions, about the same in generating code that passes tests, and better at following instructions accurately over a long period.)

Anthropic is losing money. They need to raise that price to survive in the long term. But they can't because GLM-5.1 exists at 1/5 of the price. Not a lot of people use GLM-5.1, but they don't have to. It merely has to exist at the price it does to prevent Anthropic from becoming profitable.

I'm not sure how Z.ai pulled that off. I assume the price I see (about $4.40/M-token vs $25/M-token for Opus on openrouter.ai when I last looked) covers the margins of the inference providers, so the difference must lie in the R&D costs. The model originated at Tsinghua University, its continued development likely sustained by the Chinese model of state-backed venture capital and strategic subsidies. In effect, the public sector is paying for the R&D, allowing the commercial product to be priced at a level that private Western firms simply cannot match while seeking a profit.

You could imagine the plan always is to destroy the USA's capitalist model of R&D, if it wasn't for the fact that until a few years ago public funding of science to feed fresh ideas into capitalist enterprises (the "Vannevar Bush" model) was also used by the USA.