Last week my coding agent started answering me from a model that officially does not exist. No company name, no launch blog, no system card. Just a slug on a router and a bill of exactly zero dollars.
This is the story of how I ended up running a full week of real open source work on that mystery model, what it handled well, where it fell flat, and why the strangest part was not the model at all. It was everything happening around it.
What is Ox Alpha?
Ox Alpha is a reasoning model that appeared on OpenRouter on August 20, 2026 under the identifier stealth/ox-alpha, described as built for coding, sustained agentic work, and production workloads. Nobody has claimed it. The listing says only that a third party provider chose to stay anonymous during the preview.
The headline specs are unusual for something free:
