Zhipu GLM-5.3 Officially Open-Sourced: MIT Replaced, $10B Model Service Provider Faces Security Review

Zhipu has officially open-sourced its flagship 744B-parameter model GLM-5.3, with FP8 and BF16 weights now available on Hugging Face. Unlike the previous generation GLM-5.2, this release does not continue using the MIT license, but instead adopts a new "GLM-5.3 License."

The new license remains relatively permissive for ordinary developers, allowing use, modification, distribution, deployment, fine-tuning, and even commercial sale of the model and its derivatives. However, Zhipu has added a restriction specifically for large "model-as-a-service" companies: if a company and its affiliates have total revenue exceeding $10 billion in any consecutive 12-month period, they must pass Zhipu's security review before commercially using GLM-5.3. Ordinary products that embed the model into specific functions are not subject to this restriction.

GLM-5.3 was released two weeks ago, but Zhipu decided to conduct additional security assessments and hardening before opening up the weights, as the model's cybersecurity capabilities grew beyond expectations. The model now also supports self-deployment via frameworks such as SGLang, vLLM, Transformers, and KTransformers.

[Rhythm]