Side-by-side comparison of GLM-5.1 (Zhipu AI (Z.ai) · China) and Qwen3-8B (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen) · China) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. GLM-5.1 is rated conditional; Qwen3-8B is conditional. They part ways on licence: GLM-5.1 is "MIT", Qwen3-8B is "Apache 2.0".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | 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. | Conditional Based on published licence terms, Qwen3-8B is released under standard Apache 2.0 with no field-of-use carve-outs, making self-hosted commercial deployment viable. Training-data disclosure is limited to a token count and Chinese origin creates EU AI Act Art. 53 transparency and data-transfer risks that deployers should document. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-17 | 2026-04-17 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | MIT | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Unrestricted | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Undisclosed | Token count only |
| Origin | China (Beijing) | China (Hangzhou) |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 44/100 | 11/100 |
| Speed | 48 tok/s | 86 tok/s |
| Blended price | $2.15/M | $0.31/M |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.