Z.ai confirmed that Ox Alpha, a stealth model that surged to the top of AI marketplace OpenRouter's leaderboard, is a new iteration of its GLM series and said it would release the model's weights, according to Bloomberg and KuCoin News.
Ox Alpha appeared uncredited on OpenRouter over the weekend, in what the marketplace called its biggest launch to date, and more than doubled DeepSeek's usage on the platform, Bloomberg reported. The model handles text, image and video input and is built for coding and agentic tasks.
Z.ai told Bloomberg it would publish the weights, the parameters that govern the model's behavior, allowing developers to run and build on it directly rather than through an API. KuCoin News reported the release was expected within hours of the confirmation.
Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison, whose company is acquiring OpenRouter, called the stealth release "very impressive," according to Bloomberg.
An open-weight model that beats a leaderboard anonymously before anyone knows who made it is a reminder that benchmark rankings on marketplaces like OpenRouter are becoming a real distribution channel, not just a scoreboard.