Z.ai: GLM 5.2 (free)

The z-ai/glm-5.2:free row left the OpenRouter catalog in the 2026-09-06 snapshot, a day after it was last listed — active, priced at zero, with no expiry date and no warning in the row itself. No replacement row appeared, and the changed feed is where one would show: the withdrawal is the only OpenRouter line it recorded that day, while arrivals appear there too. A live fetch of the catalog on 2026-09-07 (https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models) carried 430 rows as observed on 7 September 2026, and confirmed the withdrawal. It also showed how narrow the withdrawal was: eighteen :free rows survived across nine other authors, and z-ai/glm-5.2 itself was still listed. The bound facts above render as not published, with no as-of date to show, rather than a dated last-known value — the row has left both the current and the previous snapshot, so the data layer holds no as-of date for it, and the values it carried on its last day are pinned in data/vanished/answered/ instead.

The model is not retired, and the withdrawn row was never a model of its own. It and the surviving z-ai/glm-5.2 row carry the same canonical slug, z-ai/glm-5.2-20260616, and the same creation timestamp: two variants of one model, of which one is gone. The router still lists 34 endpoints for GLM 5.2 from twenty-four providers — Z.AI's own among them, alongside Alibaba, DeepInfra, Fireworks, Mistral, Together and Cloudflare — and not one of them is priced at zero (…/models/z-ai/glm-5.2/endpoints, fetched 2026-09-07). Z.ai still publishes the weights: the Hugging Face repository zai-org/GLM-5.2 is public, ungated, not disabled and MIT-licensed, and the Hub API reports it last modified 2026-09-01 (fetched 2026-09-07).

It was not renamed either. OpenRouter's own page for the withdrawn slug still resolves, names https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.2 as its canonical URL, and carries aliasTarget: null and deprecationDate: null in its embedded model data (fetched 2026-09-07) — the router neither pointed the slug at a replacement nor published a deprecation for it.

What went is the free route, not the model. The withdrawn slug still resolves at …/models/z-ai/glm-5.2:free/endpoints and returns its metadata with an empty endpoints array (fetched 2026-09-07). That is the delisting signature: the record survives, the supply is gone. OpenRouter documents the suffix as access to "free versions of models" that "may have different rate limits or availability compared to paid versions" (Free Variant, fetched 2026-09-07), and availability is the half that moved here. The free route was the smaller one while it lasted, too: its last-known context window was 256,000 tokens against the surviving row's 1,048,576.

Which provider served the free endpoint, and why it stopped, neither party publishes. The empty endpoints array is a current state and not a history, nothing on OpenRouter's page for the row explains the withdrawal, and the release tracker this site follows carries no GLM 5.2 deprecation of any kind. So this page records one router's withdrawal of a zero-cost serving tier for a model that is otherwise widely served and openly published, and does not guess at a cause. The feeds: binding is kept: if the row ever re-lists, it binds straight back to this entry.