Nobody knows who built AI coding model Ox Alpha or where the code goes

An nameless supplier has been handing out free entry to a frontier-class coding model on OpenRouter Inc. since Aug. 20, and no firm has admitted to constructing it.

The model is listed as “Ox Alpha” and prices nothing for enter or output tokens. OpenCode, an open-source terminal agent, debuted the model on the identical day and marketed capability of 100 trillion tokens a day. Rate limits there have been described as close to limitless.

OpenRouter advised customers in an electronic mail that free entry on its route runs by means of Monday, Aug. 24. OpenCode’s launch word promised per week from Aug. 20, which factors to about Aug. 27.

The model’s context window runs to 1,048,576 tokens and output caps at 131,072 tokens. The model takes textual content, photographs and video. Audio requests come again rejected. OpenRouter’s itemizing pitches it as a reasoning system for long-horizon software program engineering and sustained agentic work.

Early scores acquired the consideration. Ben Davis, a developer posting as @davis7, ran the model through 10 tasks on the DeepSWE software program engineering benchmark and scored it above 80%. Claude Fable 5 managed 65% on the identical duties. GPT-5.6-sol acquired 52%. Davis flagged the pattern measurement himself, warning {that a} subset that small carries quite a lot of variance.

The hedge was warranted. Davis has since run the full DeepSWE set, and Ox Alpha got here out roughly stage with GPT-5.6-sol mid somewhat than nicely forward of it. No public leaderboard has posted a end result.

The work on figuring out the lab has been extra rigorous than the scoring. A developer often called unclecode, who wrote the Crawl4AI open-source crawler, built a browser software referred to as modelprint that fingerprints nameless API endpoints. Nine infrastructure probes exit to an endpoint and the responses get matched in opposition to recognized fashions. Ox Alpha lined up with GLM-5.3 on six of the 9. That included all 4 normalized tokenizer counts. No different lab’s finest candidate cleared greater than two of the 4.

He is cautious about what that proves. “Matching fingerprints prove shared infrastructure, not identity,” unclecode wrote in the undertaking documentation. A lab can serve two totally different fashions on the identical stack, he famous.

Chinese synthetic intelligence developer Z.ai Co. has previewed anonymously earlier than. The firm ran GLM-5 on OpenRouter underneath the title Pony Alpha forward of its launch. GLM-5.3 shipped Aug. 14, six days earlier than Ox Alpha turned up.

Other testers are usually not offered. Xiaomi Corp.’s MiMo team has come up greater than as soon as, and it has previewed unbranded fashions earlier than. One studying of the tokenizer conduct factors as an alternative to cl100k_base. That encoding got here out of OpenAI Group PBC and sits oddly on a Chinese model.

The phrases have drawn as a lot consideration as the benchmarks. OpenRouter’s model web page says prompts and completions are retained by the supplier and are usually not used for coaching. Broader phrases overlaying nameless previews on the web site lengthen to coaching, analysis and enchancment. OpenCode’s route advertises zero retention from a supplier it doesn’t title.

That hole issues extra if the Z.ai attribution holds, as the U.S. Commerce Department added Zhipu AI to its Entity List on Jan. 16, 2025, in a rule that stated the listed corporations advance China’s navy modernization by means of the improvement and integration of superior synthetic intelligence analysis. Zhipu AI is Z.ai’s former title. Enterprise code is flowing to a supplier with no title hooked up. Nobody sending it could test where it lands.

Usage has not slowed. Coding instruments together with Claude Code have pushed billions of tokens by means of the model since Thursday, Bloomberg reported Sunday.

OpenRouter says it’s not the developer, proprietor or operator of Ox Alpha and solely routes requests to it.

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