Behind GLM-5-Turbo Price Hike: Rising Costs from Enhanced Model Capabilities

Many users may wonder why AI models suddenly raise prices? At the AI Open Source Roundtable of the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum, Zhang Peng, CEO of Zhipu Huazhang, gave the answer.

Zhang Peng said that the price increase of GLM-5-Turbo is a natural result of cost changes: the model can now perform long-chain thinking and reasoning, interact with infrastructure through code for debugging, and the Token amount for completing tasks is ten to a hundred times that of simple questions. At the same time, the model is larger and more capable, so service costs have increased. They hope to bring it back to a normal commercial value range to avoid low-price competition harming the industry's development.

In addition, Zhang Peng mentioned that OpenClaw is like a "scaffold", allowing ordinary people to easily use the capabilities of top models, especially programming and agent-related functions, to realize ideas without complex code.