Stealth Model Watch · An OpenRouter stealth-model file
An identity file on OpenRouter's anonymous frontier model — what's verified, what's inferred, and what's still rumor.
Independent tracker — not affiliated with OpenRouter, OpenCode, or any model lab. All identity theories below are unconfirmed.
The model
The verified baseline: everything below comes from OpenRouter's own listing and the platforms' official announcements — no community guesswork in this section.
Source: OpenRouter — stealth/ox-alpha listing ↗ · Figures captured from the listing on Aug 21, 2026.
Evidence
Every public data point so far, in order. Each entry is tiered — verified fact, community inference, or rumor — and linked to its source.
Ox Alpha goes live under stealth/ox-alpha with no developer attribution. OpenRouter introduces "a frontier model built for efficient coding, sustained agentic work, and real-world production use," suited to long-horizon software engineering and workflows that mix text with visual context.
OpenCode makes Ox Alpha free for one week at "near unlimited usage," claiming capacity for 100 trillion tokens a day and a zero-retention provider policy. Its Zen docs list the model as "Ox Alpha Free" with the id x-preview-f-free.
OpenRouter activity shows ≈336B prompt tokens and ≈4B completion tokens processed within about a day. Top senders: Claude Code (61.8B tokens), Hermes Agent (56.1B), Oh-My-Pi (49.9B), DeepSeek Harness (44.2B), ZCode (30.3B). Uptime holds at 99.99% over three days.
Community forensics run adversarial strings against Ox Alpha: one agent-assisted test matches the GLM tokenizer on 13/13 CJK, emoji and Cyrillic strings; a 25-prompt sweep lines token counts up with GLM-5.3 within a constant ~75-token wrapper; video-token math also lines up with GLM. An error-message fingerprint ([1210] "This model always engages in thinking…") matches Z.ai's GLM-5.3 API verbatim.
Other testers report edge-case tokenizer glitches that match MiMo 2.5 Pro behavior rather than GLM 5.2/5.3, and argue only a hyperscaler could serve 100T free tokens a day. Hacker News commenters add stylometry of thinking traces ("almost certainly a GLM model") and mixed censorship-probe results.
An X user's 10-task comparison puts Ox Alpha first at 80% — ahead of Fable 5 (65%), GLM-5.3 (62%), Grok-4.6 (62%) and GPT-5.6 Sol (52%). Ten questions, not a benchmark. Hands-on reports praise creative output while flagging weak visual reasoning; pelican-on-a-bicycle SVG tests at low/high/max reasoning effort circulate, with an over-thinking tendency reported at max.
The "mia" persona (@MiaAI_lab) vagueposts having private confirmation that Ox Alpha is "NOT what you think it is," claims it will be open-weight and run on 2× DGX Sparks — unverified. Others speculate an unreleased multimodal GLM-5.3 build after reports of outputs identical to public GLM-5.3.
Community items are dated approximately from post timestamps; launch-day items are dated by the official announcements themselves.
Forensics
Tokenizer fingerprinting is the core identity evidence so far. A tokenizer splits text into tokens deterministically, and each lab's tokenizer leaves a different count behind — counts that cannot be changed by prompt engineering. If Ox Alpha shares a tokenizer with a public model, every probe string should agree with it.
An agent-assisted test feeds 13 deliberately weird strings (CJK, emoji, Cyrillic) through the API: token counts come back identical to the GLM tokenizer published on Hugging Face, 13 out of 13.
Source: r/opencode identity thread ↗A developer known as dax (on X) compares raw token counts across 25 different prompts: Ox Alpha tracks GLM-5.3 each time, off by a constant ~75-token wrapper — consistent with the same base tokenizer under a different serving template.
Source: OfficeChai report ↗Sending reasoning_effort:"none" gets rejected with [1210] "This model always engages in thinking…" — the same numeric code and wording as Z.ai's GLM-5.3 API error.
Source: r/opencode identity thread ↗A malformed image triggers a Chinese-language server error (图片输入格式/解析错误, "image parse error"), pointing at a Chinese-origin serving stack — though a proxy layer can't be fully ruled out.
Source: r/opencode identity thread ↗Ox Alpha reportedly trips on the same "dirty token" edge case that has previously caught Qwen- and GLM-family models — weak alone, but consistent with the family match above.
Source: OfficeChai report ↗Community analysis of how video input is chunked into tokens also lines up with GLM's approach, notable because Ox Alpha is the first anonymous release to advertise video input at all.
Source: r/opencode launch thread ↗Bottom line: the strongest public evidence ties Ox Alpha to the GLM tokenizer family — with a live minority report for MiMo. The identity itself remains unconfirmed.
Speculation
The four candidates the community keeps returning to, each with its supporting evidence and open doubts. Ordered by public traction, not by probability.
01
The playbook repeat offender: Xiaomi has run anonymous previews before, and Ox Alpha's spec sheet fits the MiMo line.
02
Only a hyperscaler can give away 100T tokens a day — and Tencent operates exactly that class of inference infrastructure.
03
Million-token context plus native video input reads like the Gemini lineage's signature spec sheet.
04
Every hard forensic signal found so far — tokenizer, error codes, backend language — currently points here.
None of these theories is confirmed.
Access
Manually verified access points as of Aug 21, 2026 — each one checked against its official docs or listing before being included.
Home of the stealth listing. Chat in the playground or call the OpenAI-compatible API under stealth/ox-alpha — $0 during the preview, with tools, structured output and video input supported.
openrouter.ai/stealth/ox-alphaOpenCode's curated gateway lists "Ox Alpha Free" (model id x-preview-f-free) with a zero-retention provider policy — free for a limited time at near-unlimited rate limits during the promo week.
opencode.ai/docs/zenNous Research's self-improving agent offers Ox Alpha through its OpenCode and OpenRouter providers; Nous Portal lists it at $0.00/1M tokens, and Hermes Agent ranks #2 among apps sending Ox Alpha traffic on OpenRouter.
portal.nousresearch.comA fourth candidate, Cola, was checked and omitted: no official page or announcement verifying Ox Alpha support could be found at publish time. Platforms are added only after manual verification.
Signals
The primary threads driving the speculation — linked, not endorsed.
Community posts are unverified speculation unless the underlying claim comes from OpenRouter or the platforms themselves. We link, we don't endorse.
Reveal watch
No official date exists. What we have is the track record of the four anonymous releases before this one — every one of them was claimed by a lab, within days to weeks.
Days since release
1
Identity: Unknown
Computed at build time from the Aug 20, 2026 launch date.
Reveal gaps compiled from OrcaRouter's analysis of prior stealth releases and Reuters' Hunter Alpha reporting. Historical gaps describe past releases only — they are not a promise about Ox Alpha.
FAQ
Short answers, strictly limited to the verified facts on this page. Guesses are marked unconfirmed.