Use · GLM-4-9B-Chat
Is it good enough?
Ownership levelLimitednone·limited·partial·substantial·fullAnalytical input D ยท 52.8/100
This page is a projection of the one entry record, the Reliability factor that Use covers. The full verdict is set by all four factors together, floor-weighted so the weakest caps the whole.
Which domain expands which factor
- AssessUse & modify + Transparency
- ImplementData control + Reliability
- UseReliability
- SupportTransparency
Capabilities & modalities
A text chat / instruct 9B with general assistant and coding ability - capable for its mid-2024
vintage, dated by 2026.
Context window & long-context behaviour
128K on GLM-4-9B-Chat; an advertised 1M-token context on GLM-4-9B-Chat-1M (memory-intensive in
practice). OneHill has not independently measured effective long-context recall, so treat the
figures as declared windows.
Ships a 2024-era GLM chat template - use apply_chat_template and confirm behaviour on your
serving stack, as the convention is older than the current GLM line.
Language coverage
Chinese and English are strongest; per-language depth varies and is not exhaustively
documented.
GLM-4-9B-Chat documented some tool-calling support at release, but the convention is older than
the current line. Confirm and test per serving stack.
Structured / JSON-constrained output
No model-documented native JSON/schema-constrained output guarantee. Constrained decoding is
available at the serving layer (vLLM grammars), a runtime feature of the server.
How this scores
The ownership factor this domain covers, drawn from the one entry record.
3
ReliabilityIs it reliable and good enough for the job?
ModeratePerformance 2 (dated, superseded), operational 4, safety 3: runnable and broadly supported, but the below-average current capability holds reliability to moderate.
How this scores (AOI sub-dimensions)
Operational4/5how practical it is to run, serve and maintain in productionA small 9B dense model with broad serving (vLLM, transformers, llama.cpp, Ollama) and extensive community quants, runnable on a single GPU.
Safety3/5whether misuse risks are evaluated and guardrails are providedA safety-tuned chat model with documented behaviour, meeting the score-3 anchor, but with China-aligned alignment, no first-party guard model, and older/lighter tuning than current frontier practice - deployers must add their own guardrails.
What this means for adoptionYou have only limited ownership of the original GLM-4-9B-Chat: the custom glm-4 licence is revocable, gates commercial use behind registration, restricts fields of use, and forces a 'glm-4' name prefix and 'Built with glm-4' attribution on every derivative - so use-and-modify is weak and your continued-use control is contingent. Combined with dated capability, ownership lands at limited, the low end of the GLM family and well below the MIT GLM line (the `glm` entry, substantial). Use this checkpoint only if you specifically need it: complete the commercial registration, honour the naming and field-of-use terms, and account for the revocable grant - otherwise adopt the MIT GLM models instead.
Sources
The same evidence records as the entry sheet. Read means the text was verified; unverified means it is known to exist but not yet read.
Licenceread2026-08-03
THUDM/glm-4-9b LICENSE, read: [Sec 2] "a non-exclusive, worldwide, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable, royalty-free copyright license"; free for academic research; "Commercial users must complete registration ...
Model cardread2026-08-03
GLM-4-9B-Chat model card on the verified THUDM HF org: a 9B dense chat model with a 128K context (and a 1M-context GLM-4-9B-Chat-1M variant), safetensors; broad serving (vLLM, transformers, llama.cpp, Ollama) and extensive community quants; a mid-2024 release.
Third-party analysisunverified2026-08-03
GLM-4-9B-Chat was a capable small model at its mid-2024 release but is dated by 2026 and superseded within its own family by GLM-4-9B-0414 and the 4.5/4.6 line.
Third-party analysisunverified2026-08-03
GLM chat models carry China-aligned alignment on politically sensitive topics and ship no companion guard model; the original 9B's safety tuning is older/lighter than current practice.
Third-party analysisunverified2026-08-03
The glm-4 licence is revocable and gates commercial use behind registration with field-of-use and naming restrictions (non-FOSS), so no open-source exemption applies; no EU copyright policy or training-content summary is published, and the licence is governed by PRC law.