GLM-4.5 Air is the lightweight sibling of GLM-4.5 — a smaller, cheaper model tuned for speed and volume. It is the GLM you reach for when cost-per-token and throughput matter more than peak quality.
z.ai publishes GLM-4.5 Air at $0.20 per 1M input tokens and $1.10 per 1M output tokens — the cheapest paid GLM tier, well below the standard GLM-4.5.
It advertises a 128K-token context window.
Architecture & training signals
GLM-4.5 Air is the smaller, efficiency-oriented variant of GLM-4.5 from Zhipu AI. It keeps tool-calling and JSON support in a lighter package aimed at throughput and cost, over an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Like the rest of the GLM line, it returns a non-standard reasoning_content field alongside content in its OpenAI-compatible responses; integrations should read content for the final answer and treat reasoning_content as an optional trace.
Where it shines
- High-volume, cost-sensitive workloads — classification, extraction, bulk drafting.
- Lower latency than the full GLM-4.5.
- The lowest paid GLM price point.
Where it falls short
- Lower ceiling than the full-size models — not for the hardest reasoning.
- No Tokonomix benchmark data yet; validate on your tasks.
- Non-EU hosting.
Real-world use cases
- Bulk data processing where cost dominates.
- Interactive features needing fast, cheap responses.
- First-pass drafting before a stronger model refines.
Tokonomix benchmark snapshot
GLM-4.5 Air is newly registered on Tokonomix and not yet activated, so we have not run it through our weekly intelligence test or speed benchmark. There are no Tokonomix scores to report yet — and we will not invent any.
When it goes live, it enters the same weekly harness as every other model: identical prompts, an independent cross-family judge, and reproducible latency and cost measurements. Until then, treat the pricing and capability notes on this page as the vendor-published starting point, not as measured Tokonomix results.
EU privacy & data residency
GLM-4.5 Air is built by Zhipu AI (z.ai), a China-headquartered lab, and is served from non-EU infrastructure. This is important to state plainly: routing a prompt to this model is not an EU-data-residency or GDPR-sovereign choice, and Tokonomix will never tag it as one.
If your use case requires data to stay within the EU, pick a model whose provider is EU-hosted (for example our OVH or Azure-EU routes) rather than a GLM model. Tokonomix keeps z.ai out of every EU-only / sovereign routing set by design. Use GLM where its capability or price is the priority and cross-border processing is acceptable for that workload.
Verdict & alternatives
GLM-4.5 Air is the GLM economy tier: cheap and quick, with a sensibly lower ceiling. When cost matters even more, the GLM-4.7/4.5 Flash tiers are free; when quality matters more, step up to full GLM-4.5 or above.