Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
The mystery surrounding Ox Alpha, a powerful AI model that suddenly became one of the most-used models on OpenRouter, has been solved. Chinese AI company Z.AI, also known as Zhipu, has confirmed to Bloomberg that it developed the model as a new addition to its GLM family.
Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter over the weekend without information about its creator. The anonymous launch quickly caught the attention of developers because the model was available for free and showed strong performance on coding, reasoning and agentic tasks. It can also work with text, images and video.
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The model’s popularity grew rapidly after its arrival. According to the report, Ox Alpha moved to the top of OpenRouter’s usage leaderboard, with usage more than twice that of DeepSeek. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, whose company is acquiring OpenRouter, also tested the model and described it as “very impressive.”
Ox Alpha was reportedly the biggest launch in OpenRouter’s history. The unusual scale of the free trial was another reason Ox Alpha attracted attention. OpenCode said developers could experiment with the model throughout the week without normal usage limits, while claiming that the infrastructure behind it could handle as many as 100 trillion tokens every day.
Before Z.AI confirmed its involvement, developers and AI researchers had already started connecting Ox Alpha with the Chinese company. Wccftech had recently pointed to similarities in the model’s behaviour and tokenizer. Z.AI had also previously used an anonymous testing approach for another model, adding to the speculation.
Z.AI confirms model and plans to release its weights
Z.AI has now confirmed to Bloomberg that Ox Alpha is part of its GLM series. The company said it will release the model’s weights, which are the parameters that guide how an AI system processes information and generates responses. Making the weights available will allow developers to build their own applications and services on top of the model.
The company is offering free access to Ox Alpha for one week. It has not yet revealed how much users will have to pay after the free period ends.
Z.AI is not the first Chinese AI developer to quietly release a model without immediately revealing its identity. Alibaba and Xiaomi have also followed a similar approach this year. Such launches allow companies to see how users respond to a new system before making a formal announcement.
Ox Alpha’s arrival comes as Chinese AI companies continue to release powerful models at lower costs than many US competitors. Z.AI recently introduced GLM-5.3, while firms such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI have also attracted global attention with their AI models.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
