Ox Alpha tops OpenRouter leaderboard after anonymous Z.AI free launch
Technology
Ox Alpha just shook up the AI world by becoming the most-used model on OpenRouter, moving to the top of OpenRouter's usage leaderboard.
Created by Chinese company Z.AI (Zhipu), it launched anonymously and instantly stood out for its strong coding, reasoning skills, and ability to work with text, images, and video, all for free.
Z.AI to release Ox Alpha weights
What really set Ox Alpha apart was a free trial week that let developers try it out without normal usage limits.
This led to more than double the usage of its closest rival and made it OpenRouter's biggest launch yet, with the infrastructure behind the model able to handle as many as 100 trillion tokens every day.
Z.AI now plans to release Ox Alpha's weights so developers can build their own apps on top of it.