Over the weekend, geeks were buzzing with speculation about which AI lab might be behind Ox Alpha. Ox Alpha is a mysterious new openweight AI model that was anonymously launched on OpenRouter and is already topping benchmarks and leaderboards over the best models.
As most expected, Ox Alpha was created by GLM manufacturer Z.ai, according to Bloomberg. Z.ai has confirmed that Ox Alpha is the latest version of its GLM series. This series was recently famously used by Hugging Face to defend against attacks from OpenAI agents.
The company released Ox Alpha weights on Wednesday and said developers could then build weights on top of them. The company describes Ox Alpha as “an inference model designed for coding, sustained agent work, and production workloads. It’s suitable for long-term software engineering, complex inference, and workflows that combine text and visual context.”
The release of Ox Alpha increases the threat of cheaper, more capable models made in China, which could take real market share away from expensive frontier model companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Earlier this month, Z.ai released GLM-5.3, which rivals Anthropic’s Fable 5 in certain benchmarks.
TechCrunch has reached out to Z.ai for comment.
