The Chinese AI lab Z.ai, formerly Zhipu AI, launched ZCode this week. The free application is an IDE built around its proprietary GLM-5.2 model. With this, Z.ai is going head-to-head with Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Google Antigravity.
ZCode isn’t so much a traditional IDE with an AI chat window attached as it is centered entirely around the ZCode Agent. This agent is tailored to GLM-5.2, the open-weight model that competes with the slightly older Claude Opus models in benchmarks. The user describes a desired outcome, after which the agent plans the work, edits files, performs checks, and continues working until the goal is achieved. Sensitive commands and actions requiring elevated privileges prompt for confirmation by default, just like with competing solutions.
The remote function is particularly noteworthy. A running agent can be controlled from a phone via WeChat, Feishu, or Telegram. This is especially appealing to Chinese developers, where these messaging apps dominate professional communication. The tool is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux (the latter still in beta) and supports bring-your-own-key for third-party models. In other words, it’s an approach that in many ways resembles tools like OpenCode, Cline, Claude Code, Cursor, Antigravity, and Codex.
Free, with paid options available at lower prices
Downloading is free. Z.ai monetizes ZCode through the GLM Coding Plan, which starts at $16.20 per month and goes up to $144 for the Max tier. According to the company, this is significantly lower than comparable rates from Anthropic and Cursor. Until July 31, subscribers also receive a 1.5x bonus on their quotas.
Without a doubt, the solution is particularly interesting because GLM-5.2 is so competitive. It is a Mixture-of-Experts model with 744 billion parameters, 40 billion of which are active, and a context window of one million tokens. As an open-weight model, it is also available outside of Z.ai through third-party providers. Another striking achievement: the model was trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips, without any U.S. hardware. The weights are available on Hugging Face under an MIT license.
A crowded market
ZCode faces stiff competition and has a lot to prove, even though users can try out the tool for free. Cursor, recently acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, is considered the favorite, while GitHub Copilot leads in terms of users, with approximately 20 million total and 4.7 million paying subscribers. Z.ai’s timing is strategic: the open-source model was released around the time the U.S. temporarily blocked access to Anthropic’s best LLMs, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for non-U.S. residents, effectively banning the model entirely, since Anthropic cannot always verify its users’ origins. That export restriction has since been lifted.