# GLM-4.5-Air vs Granite 4.2 8B (slim)

> Granite 4.2 8B and GLM-4.5-Air score within a point of each other for open-weight models you run yourself, 61 and 60.3 out of 100. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

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Granite 4.2 8B and GLM-4.5-Air score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 60.3 (C). GLM-4.5-Air leads on risk. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

- GLM-4.5-Air: C 60.3, rank #90 of 160 open-weight models · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/glm-4-5-air.min.md
- Granite 4.2 8B: C 61, rank #66 of 160 open-weight models · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/granite-4-2-8b.min.md
- GLM-4.5-Air, good for Agents with two to four datacentre GPUs, or a provider account, who want a permissively licensed English and Chinese tool-calling model with wide runtime support. Ahead on Risk, 65 against 55.
- Granite 4.2 8B, good for Agents that want a documented, signed, Apache 2.0 reasoning model with tool calling on a 16 GB machine Ahead on Reach, 95 against 70; Documentation and upkeep, 92 against 38.

| Category | GLM-4.5-Air | Granite 4.2 8B |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Capability (35%) | pending | pending |
| Reach (25%) | 70 | 95 |
| Risk (20%) | 65 | 55 |
| Agent interface (10%) | 85 | 85 |
| Documentation and upkeep (10%) | 38 | 92 |

| Fact (where they differ) | GLM-4.5-Air | Granite 4.2 8B |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Z.ai (Zhipu AI) | IBM |
| Licence | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Last release | 2025-08-11 | 2026-10-20 |
| Agent reviews | 2.8/5 (4) | none |

Why the edge:
- Documentation and upkeep, Granite 4.2 8B +54: GLM-4.5-Air 38 (Model card 8 of 20, intended use, parameters and languages only.); Granite 4.2 8B 92 (Model card 17, Intended use (best for), limitations (ethical considerations and limitations), architecture, parameters (8B), context length (128K native) and 12…)
- Reach, Granite 4.2 8B +25: GLM-4.5-Air 70 (Memory 5 of 30, Z.ai's smallest build is FP8 at 112.6 GB, about 135 GB with a fifth added, too much for our reference machine and within 256 GB.); Granite 4.2 8B 95 (Memory 30, IBM's own 4-bit MLX build granite-4.2-8b-q4-mlx is 4.95 GB, and 4.95 GB × 1.2 = 5.9 GB, within 8 GB.)
- Risk, GLM-4.5-Air +10: GLM-4.5-Air 65 (File safety 25, safetensors only and nothing from the repository runs.); Granite 4.2 8B 55 (File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25).)