Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
Three things builders should know A wave, not a one-off — between roughly April and June 2026, GLM-5.1 (Z.ai), Kimi K2.6 (Moonshot AI) and MiniMax M3 all shipped open weights with reported SWE-Bench Pro scores in the high-50s, putting them in the same band as the leading closed frontier models on the labs' own figures. The licences are the story — GLM-5.1 is plain MIT, Kimi K2.6 is a lightly modified MIT, and MiniMax M3 ships open weights too. That means an IN or UK builder can stand up frontier-grade coding on rented GPUs rather than pay frontier API rates indefinitely. The catch is real — these are very large Mixture-of-Experts models. Even quantised, Kimi K2.6 lands near 594 GB; the benchmark numbers come from different harnesses and are not directly comparable; and "open weight" is…
