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Z.AI

Install

To use ZaiModel, you need to either install pydantic-ai, or install pydantic-ai-slim with the zai optional group:

Terminal
pip install "pydantic-ai-slim[zai]"

Configuration

To use Z.AI (Zhipu AI) through their API, go to z.ai and generate an API key.

For a list of available models, see the Z.AI documentation.

Environment variable

Once you have the API key, you can set it as an environment variable:

Terminal
export ZAI_API_KEY='your-api-key'

You can then use ZaiModel by name:

from pydantic_ai import Agent

agent = Agent('zai:glm-5')
...

Or initialise the model directly with just the model name:

from pydantic_ai import Agent
from pydantic_ai.models.zai import ZaiModel

model = ZaiModel('glm-5')
agent = Agent(model)
...

Thinking mode

Z.AI’s glm-5.2, glm-5.1, glm-5, glm-4.7, glm-4.6 (hybrid thinking), and glm-4.5 (interleaved thinking) models support thinking/reasoning mode, where the model produces reasoning content before the final response. This includes the glm-4.6v and glm-4.5v vision models. Configure this through the unified thinking setting:

from pydantic_ai import Agent
from pydantic_ai.settings import ModelSettings

agent = Agent(
    'zai:glm-5',
    model_settings=ModelSettings(thinking=True),
)
...

thinking=True enables thinking and thinking=False disables it. On GLM-5.2, an explicit effort level ('minimal'/'low'/'medium'/'high'/'xhigh') is forwarded to Z.AI as reasoning_effort; on other GLM models, which don’t expose effort granularity, the effort levels all collapse to enabled. Omit the field to use each model’s default behavior.

Preserved thinking

On thinking-capable models, reasoning content from prior assistant responses is preserved by default — no configuration required — for better multi-turn coherence and consistency with other providers. The complete, unmodified reasoning_content from prior turns is automatically sent back to the API by Pydantic AI.

If you instead want each turn to start fresh, disable it with zai_clear_thinking=True via the Z.AI-specific ZaiModelSettings:

from pydantic_ai import Agent
from pydantic_ai.models.zai import ZaiModelSettings

agent = Agent(
    'zai:glm-5',
    # Opt out of the default preserved thinking:
    model_settings=ZaiModelSettings(thinking=True, zai_clear_thinking=True),
)
...

See the Z.AI thinking mode documentation for more details.

provider argument

You can provide a custom Provider via the provider argument. In the simplest case, pass ZaiProvider with just an API key. If you also want to customize the underlying httpx.AsyncClient, pass it when constructing the provider:

from httpx import AsyncClient

from pydantic_ai import Agent
from pydantic_ai.models.zai import ZaiModel
from pydantic_ai.providers.zai import ZaiProvider

custom_http_client = AsyncClient(timeout=30)
model = ZaiModel(
    'glm-5',
    provider=ZaiProvider(api_key='your-api-key', http_client=custom_http_client),
)
agent = Agent(model)
...

If you do not need a custom HTTP client, omit the http_client=custom_http_client argument.