Mystery AI model Ox Alpha beats Claude, may be Zhipu's GLM

OpenRouter, the world's largest AI aggregator, launched a mysterious AI model called Ox Alpha on August 20, free for one week. It scored about 80% on the DeepSWE benchmark across 10 tasks, beating Claude Fable 5's 65% and GPT-5.6 Sol's 52%. Developer Ben Davis is puzzled by the result since the model's source is unknown.

The model supports a 1M token context window and multimodal input for text, images, and video. It's free during the preview. OpenCode, a terminal coding agent, also offers it, claiming 100 trillion tokens processed daily.

Researchers found Ox Alpha's tokenizer fingerprint nearly matches Zhipu's GLM-5.3, with only a 75-token wrapper difference. Video encoder behavior and API responses also align with Zhipu's architecture. Clues point to Zhipu, but it's not officially confirmed.