Revolut swaps Claude for GLM open-weight model, cutting AI coding bill by 90%

Revolut has moved its roughly 2,000 software engineers off Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex as default coding tools onto GLM, an open-weight model from Chinese lab Z.ai that Revolut hosts itself, bringing its bill to about a tenth of what it paid Anthropic and OpenAI. David Abitbol, who runs AI operations and infrastructure at Revolut, said the company serves GLM from about 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs at a blended cost of around $0.30 per million tokens, and reported roughly 60% shorter coding time and 70% shorter lead time in a sample of about 2,000 engineers, though the comparison does not isolate the model change from other causes. Abitbol said the 90% saving excludes cloud, staff and monitoring costs and depended on heavy tuning, with out-of-the-box inference "terrible" until time to first token fell from about 14 seconds to 1.7 seconds on the same GPUs.