The mysterious free model, called Hunter Alpha, surfaced on the AI gateway platform OpenRouter on March 11 without any developer attribution and was later described by the platform as a "stealth model." The system also advertises a context window of up to one million tokens, a measure of how much text an AI model can process or remember during a single interaction. Those specifications resembled expectations in local media for DeepSeek's next-generation V4 model, which Chinese outlets have reported could launch as early as April. Umur Ozkul, who runs independent AI benchmark tests, said speculation connecting the model to DeepSeek was understandable given the timing and capabilities advertised. An anonymous model called Pony Alpha appeared on OpenRouter in February before Chinese firm Zhipu AI confirmed it was part of its GLM-5 system five days later.

Source: The Edge Markets March 19, 2026 04:32 UTC