The stealth model that beat DeepSeek belongs to Zhipu

Z.AI’s Ox Alpha, a new GLM-5.x iteration from Beijing-based Zhipu, surged to the top of OpenRouter’s usage charts, more than doubling DeepSeek’s traffic after its stealth launch on 20 August. Researchers identified it by matching tokenizers, temperature limits and error messages, and found its system prompt blocks provenance disclosure while its censorship profile shows selective restrictions rather than a blanket reduction.