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