Ox Alpha showed up on OpenRouter on 20 August with no author attached to it. Nobody has confirmed which lab built it — community fingerprinting points at Z.ai's GLM family, unconfirmed. It has a 1M-token context window, it's been scoring well on coding benchmarks, and it's free during its preview window, which is expected to run to roughly 27 August.
I wanted to try it on a real project without disturbing the Claude Code setup I use every day. This is what I worked out.
The key detail most guides skip: if you configure this the obvious way, you'll silently reroute all your Claude sessions through OpenRouter and start burning credits instead of your subscription. The setup below scopes it to a single project folder so that doesn't happen.
What you're actually doing
Claude Code normally talks to Anthropic's API. OpenRouter exposes an endpoint that speaks the same protocol, so you can point Claude Code at OpenRouter instead and have it route to Ox Alpha.
