GLM 4.6 vs Claude 4.5 Sonnet : The best Coding LLM?
GLM 4.6 beats Claude 4.5 Sonnet on coding benchmarks
Just at the moment when Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Sonnet was about to take the coding universe, z.ai has come back with a bang and has released GLM 4.6, which is looking to crush every single benchmark on coding, and not just that, it’s open source, which gives it a huge edge over Claude 4.5 Sonnet, which is closed.
https://medium.com/media/73db0a38c28b3d1c03d78fd553af4335/href
So, which LLM is better? GLM 4.6 or Claude 4.5 Sonnet
Definitely GLM 4.6, being equivalent to Claude 4.5 Sonnet and on top of it, open-sourced
Costing : GLM 4.6 is faster
The GLM Coding Plan is a subscription from Z.ai that provides developers with a coding model comparable in performance to Claude, at 1/7th the price and with three times the usage.
Benchmarks
Math: AIME 25 (GLM 4.6)
GLM-4.6 doesn’t just edge ahead here it dominates. On olympiad-style math problems, it hits 98.6 with tools versus Claude’s 87.0. This shows how sharp GLM has become at multi-step symbolic reasoning. If you’re building systems that solve abstract problems or automate scientific work, this matters.
Graduate-Level QA: GPQA (Claude by a whisker)
Claude 4.5 sneaks ahead here, 83.4 against GLM’s 82.9 (with tools). Not a big margin, but it suggests Claude has slightly deeper academic science recall.
Coding: LiveCodeBench v6 (GLM 4.6)
This one isn’t close. GLM-4.6 scores 84.5 (with tools) while Claude sits at 57.7. LiveCodeBench is about writing, debugging, and executing code across languages.
GLM is clearly tuned for this; Claude looks underpowered by comparison.
Logic: HLE (GLM 4.6)
Hard Logical Evaluation highlights another gap: GLM-4.6 at 30.4 (with tools) versus Claude 4.5 at 17.3. Logical consistency is critical for agents you can’t afford hallucinated steps in a legal workflow or puzzle-solving task. GLM handles this better.
Web Browsing: BrowseComp (GLM 4.6)
GLM-4.6 again. 45.1 vs Claude 4.5’s 19.6. If you want an agent that can go online, fetch sources, and act on them, GLM is far more capable.
Software Engineering: SWE-bench Verified (Claude 4.5 Sonnet)
Here Claude shows its edge. On fixing real-world GitHub issues, Claude 4.5 hits 77.2 versus GLM’s 68.0. Coding benchmarks measure execution on clean snippets, SWE-bench measures engineering: messy repos, undocumented functions, real bugs. Claude reads codebases better and produces patches that stick.
Terminal Usage: Terminal-Bench (GLM 4.6)
GLM-4.6 takes this one, 40.5 vs Claude’s 35.5. It’s a smaller gap but shows GLM is slightly more reliable when acting as a shell-driven agent.
Weighted Reasoning: τ²-Bench (Claude)
Claude wins again. 88.1 versus GLM’s 75.9. This is a composite benchmark that blends reasoning, coding, knowledge, and tool use. Claude’s higher score suggests it has more balanced competence across tasks. GLM spikes in certain areas but dips when things get more integrated.
The Takeaway
GLM-4.6 looks like the better coding and agentic model. It crushes benchmarks in math, programming, browsing, logic, and even command-line use. Claude 4.5 Sonnet, though, remains stronger, it being closed sopurce, would never be my 1st choice.
GLM 4.6 is a coding monster, that is free to use
GLM 4.6 vs Claude 4.5 Sonnet : The best Coding LLM? was originally published in Data Science in Your Pocket on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
