Is the reign of expensive proprietary models ending? The release of GLM-4.7 by Z.AI has sent shockwaves through the developer community, with early benchmarks and user reports suggesting it might finally be the open-source rival to Anthropic's flagship Claude Opus 4.5.

While official charts primarily target Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5, community discussions on Reddit are telling a bolder story: specifically in agentic coding and “thinking” tasks, GLM-4.7 is punching far above its weight class—and doing it for a fraction of the cost.

Here is the definitive breakdown of how GLM-4.7 stacks up against the current king of reasoning.

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1. The Core Difference: “Thinking” Architecture

The defining feature of GLM-4.7 is its rigorous implementation of “Thinking” capabilities, which directly challenges the reasoning superiority usually reserved for Opus-class models.

• Interleaved Thinking: Unlike standard models that rush to answer, GLM-4.7 “thinks” before every response and tool call. This mimics the chain-of-thought process that makes Claude Opus 4.5 so effective at complex instruction following.

• Preserved Thinking: This is the game-changer for agents. In multi-turn conversations (like debugging a long error log), GLM-4.7 retains its “thought blocks” across the entire session. It doesn't just remember what was said; it remembers why it made previous decisions.

• The Result: Users reporting on r/LocalLLM noted that for tasks like fixing concurrency issues in Playwright tests, GLM-4.7’s reasoning felt indistinguishable from high-end proprietary models.

2. Coding Performance: Benchmarks vs. Reality

This is where the controversy—and excitement—lies.

The Official Numbers

According to Z.AI’s technical report, GLM-4.7 scores 84.9 on LiveCodeBench V6, significantly outperforming Claude Sonnet 4.5 (64.0). While it falls slightly behind Opus 4.5 in pure abstract reasoning benchmarks (like MMLU-Pro), the coding metrics are “insane” for an open-weight model.

The OpenCode CLI Experience

On r/opencodeCLI, developers testing GLM-4.7 inside agentic tools (like OpenCode and Claude Code) are reporting results that rival Opus 4.5 in practical workflows.

• Speed: Users describe it as “faster than 4.6 by a wide margin,” closer to lightweight models like Kimi or Nemotron, yet with the heavy-lifting logic of a dense model.

• Stability: The “Preserved Thinking” feature seems to solve the “lazy dev” problem where models degrade after 10+ turns.

• The Caveat: Some users warn of “benchmaxxing”—where a model is over-optimized for tests but feels “brittle” in niche real-world scenarios compared to the “workhorse” reliability of Sonnet or Opus.

3. Barrier to Entry: Hardware vs. Cloud

The biggest difference between the two is accessibility.

• Claude Opus 4.5: A closed API. It is the most expensive model on the market, offering zero control over privacy or weights. You pay a premium for the “it just works” magic.

• GLM-4.7: A massive 360B+ parameter beast.

  • Local Use: To run this locally (and beat Opus), you need enterprise-grade hardware (multiple H100s or a cluster of consumer GPUs). A single Mac Studio M2 Ultra likely won't cut it without heavy quantization.

  • API Cost: This is the killer app. Z.AI is offering GLM-4.7 via API for roughly 1/7th the price of comparable Claude tiers, with a “Coding Plan” that undercuts Anthropic aggressively.

4. Why Developers Are Switching

The sentiment on Reddit is shifting from “curiosity” to “practical adoption.”

1. Tool Use: GLM-4.7’s native ability to handle web browsing (scoring 67 on BrowseComp) and terminal commands makes it a drop-in replacement for Claude in agentic workflows.

2. No “Lazy” Refusals: Unlike the safety-heavy Opus 4.5, which can sometimes refuse complex requests or lecture the user, GLM-4.7 (while still safe) is described as more “pragmatic” and willing to execute code.

3. Ownership: For teams building internal tools, the option to self-host (eventually, with enough compute) offers data security that Anthropic cannot match.

Final Verdict: Is it an “Opus Killer”?

Not yet—but it's close enough that the price difference might not matter.

If you need the absolute pinnacle of creative writing and nuance, Claude Opus 4.5 remains the gold standard. However, for coding agents, debugging, and systematic reasoning, GLM-4.7 has effectively commoditized “Opus-level” intelligence.

Winner for Value: GLM-4.7 Winner for Raw Logic: Claude Opus 4.5 (by a hair)

Ready to test it? You can try GLM-4.7 via the Z.ai platform or pull the weights from HuggingFace if you have the GPU horsepower.