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The mystery behind the anonymous Ox Alpha AI model has been solved. Z.ai, the company behind the GLM family of AI models, created the new open-weight system that quickly gained attention after appearing on AI leaderboards.

The model was launched anonymously on OpenRouter’s model rankings, where it attracted attention from developers and AI researchers for its performance against leading models.

According to Bloomberg, Z.ai confirmed that Ox Alpha is the latest version of its GLM series. The company said it plans to release the model’s weights on Wednesday, allowing developers to build applications and systems on top of it.

Z.ai targets coding and long-term AI tasks

Z.ai describes Ox Alpha as a reasoning model built for coding, sustained agentic work, and production workloads. The company said the model is designed for long-term software engineering tasks, complex reasoning, and workflows that combine text with visual information.

The release adds another competitor to the growing group of open-weight AI models emerging from China. These models are increasingly challenging the dominance of expensive frontier systems developed by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Z.ai has previously gained attention through its GLM model family. Hugging Face also used the company’s technology during a recent security incident involving attacks from OpenAI agents.

Open AI models increase competition.

The launch of Ox Alpha comes as developers and businesses look for capable AI systems that can be deployed at lower costs. Open-weight models allow developers to access model parameters and customise systems for specific use cases.

Earlier this month, Z.ai released GLM-5.3, which the company said performs competitively with leading models on certain benchmarks.