Side-by-side comparison of DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek · China) and GLM-5.1 (Zhipu AI (Z.ai) · China) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. DeepSeek R1 is rated conditional; GLM-5.1 is conditional. They part ways on commercial use: DeepSeek R1 is "Yes", GLM-5.1 is "Unrestricted".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Frontier reasoning model at o1-class performance. MIT licence makes weights legally clean. Same Chinese-origin alignment/supply-chain considerations as DeepSeek V3. Distilled Qwen/Llama versions inherit their base licence. | Conditional Per current documentation, GLM-5.1 is released under a verbatim MIT License with no use restrictions, enabling self-hosted commercial deployment. However, training-data opacity, Beijing-based publisher, and Zhipu AI's presence on the US BIS Entity List create EU AI Act transparency and supply-chain screening risks for regulated deployers. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-15 | 2026-04-17 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | MIT | MIT |
| Commercial use | Yes | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Undisclosed |
| Origin | China | China (Beijing) |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 27/100 | 44/100 |
| Speed | — | 48 tok/s |
| Blended price | $2.36/M | $2.15/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.