GLM-5.2 Is Free And Beats Claude On Most Work. So Why Can't Companies Switch?

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• GLM-5.2 beats Claude on cost (free tier, then dramatically cheaper) and matches on most knowledge and coding benchmarks — but enterprises can’t switch because switching cost is no longer capability-based, it’s context-based.
• The three lock-in layers that cost-effective models can’t substitute: accumulated workflow context (prompts, CLAUDE.md files, skills), routing decisions (which agents handle what), and institutional knowledge (the learned preferences and constraints baked into the existing system).
• Practical implication: the CLM → Claude transition isn’t an API swap; it’s a context migration. The underappreciated cost of cheap alternatives is that they require rebuilding context infrastructure from scratch, not just changing a model endpoint.
• Practical takeaway: measure switching cost as context-rebuild time, not API integration time — for most mature enterprise deployments the former is 10–100x the latter.