Agentic AI

The Agent Cost Wars — Updated: GLM-5, M2.7, and What the Leaderboard Actually Tells Us

• Haggai Philip Zagury
• Agentic ai

TL;DR A week ago I published a piece about MiniMax M2.5’s “$1/hour agent” promise and called it the dawn of always-on intelligence. Since then, the leaderboard moved — fast. GLM-5 dethroned M2.5 as the top open-weight model, M2.7 shipped with the same aggressive pricing but unconfirmed licensing, and Gemini 3.1 Pro quietly became the price-performance king among flagships. This is my attempt to challenge my own earlier post with updated numbers from Artificial Analysis, and share some careful impressions on what this means for practitioners heading into the second half of 2026.

The $1,892 Agent: MiniMax M2.5 and the Dawn of Always-On Intelligence

• Haggai Philip Zagury
• Agentic ai , Dev ops

TL;DR

MiniMax M2.5 is a 230B-parameter model that activates only 4% of its weights per token — yet scores 80% on SWE-bench Verified, putting it neck-to-neck with Anthropic Opus 4.6 at roughly 3% of the cost. At ~$1,892/year for a continuously running agent, the “always-on agent” is no longer a thought experiment. The cost of intelligence is approaching the cost of electricity, and Jevons’ Paradox says: demand is about to explode.