A free model called Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter this week with capacity for 100 trillion tokens per day. No one knows who built it.
A free AI model appeared on Thursday on OpenRouter, and nobody is saying who built it. The model, called Ox Alpha, is listed as a "stealth model" from an anonymous third-party provider. OpenRouter describes it as a "reasoning model designed for coding, sustained agentic work, and production workloads" suited for "long-horizon software engineering, complex reasoning, and workflows that combine text with visual context."
OpenCode, an open-source AI coding agent, said on X that Ox Alpha would be free for one week with "near unlimited usage." The provider has capacity for 100 trillion tokens per day, roughly 100 times what Visa said it uses in an entire month.
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison tried the model and posted on X that "it's very impressive." The comment drew immediate attention across developer circles.
Early speculation points to a Chinese AI lab. Wccftech, an online tech publication, suggested Z.ai – the lab behind GLM-5 – as one possibility. The same company previously tested GLM-5 anonymously under the name "Pony Alpha," and developers have identified similarities in Ox Alpha's tokenizer behavior and responses, Wccftech reported.
Chinese labs like Zhipu, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI have increasingly challenged US rivals. Their models approach the performance of leading American systems at lower cost and are often open-source. Moonshot's Kimi K3, released in July, is a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight model built for coding and reasoning tasks. It drew interest in Silicon Valley for its price and performance.
Still, the evidence is far from conclusive. Wccftech later posted a competing analysis suggesting Ox Alpha's tokenizer could instead point toward Microsoft's MAI family.
Andrew Curran, an AI analyst, wrote on X that on Friday night GLM was the leading theory. By Saturday morning, he said, "people seem less sure of anything."
Prepared with AlphaScala editorial tooling from the source reporting linked above. Indexable analysis may include a cited Alpha Score value. Publishing checks screen each story before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.