# Zhipu AI Releases Open, Bilingual GLM-Image Model

> The new text-to-image model is fluent in both Chinese and English, built on the CogView2 architecture and released under a permissive MIT license.

Published by The Open Weights on Jan 8, 2026. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/glm-image-vx9z

## Key facts

- Company: Zhipu AI
- Model: GLM-Image
- Version: 1.0
- Category: Text → Image
- Modalities: Text → Image
- License: MIT (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Architecture: GlmImagePipeline
- Precision: BF16
- Weights size: 13.9 GB
- Significance: notable
- Published: 2026-01-08
- Last verified: 2026-06-17
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-Image
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/glm-image-vx9z

Zhipu AI, a prominent Beijing-based AI research company, has released GLM-Image, a new open-source model for generating images from text descriptions. The model's primary distinction is its native bilingual capability, fluently understanding prompts in both Chinese and English.

This release is a notable contribution to the open-source multimodal landscape, which has historically been dominated by English-centric models. By providing a powerful bilingual tool under a permissive MIT license, Zhipu AI is lowering the barrier for developers and researchers worldwide to build applications that serve a more linguistically diverse audience.

## Technical Foundations

GLM-Image is a diffusion model built upon the architecture of CogView2, an earlier powerful text-to-image model from the same research lineage. It works by pairing a Transformer-based text encoder with the diffusion model that synthesizes the final image.

The model and its weights are available for download from the project's [Hugging Face repository](https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-Image). This move continues Zhipu AI's pattern of contributing significant models to the open-source community, fostering further innovation in multimodal AI research.

## Get the model

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-Image)

## Sources

- [zai-org/GLM-Image](https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-Image) — Hugging Face, Jan 8, 2026

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Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "Zhipu AI Releases Open, Bilingual GLM-Image Model", The Open Weights, Jan 8, 2026, https://theopenweights.com/news/glm-image-vx9z