Developers Are Running OX Alpha — Free, Anonymous, Strong on Coding, but Its Retention Policy Contradicts Itself

An unidentified model appeared on OpenRouter on August 20 with a 1M-token context window and free pricing. It scores 80% on DeepSWE — above GPT-5.6 Sol on that benchmark. Its operator is still anonymous, and its data retention terms disagree depending on which page you read.

OX Alpha accepts text, image, and video input with tool-calling support. On DeepSWE (an agentic coding benchmark), it scores 80%, ranking above GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5 in that specific test. Community fingerprinting published August 22 points with high confidence to Zhipu AI's GLM infrastructure — likely GLM-5.3 — but no lab has officially claimed it.

The retention problem

The per-model data notice and the OpenRouter stealth-model listing give different answers. One access route (OpenCode) says zero retention; the OpenRouter listing says the anonymous provider retains prompts and completions. That contradiction was still unresolved as of August 23.

The practical guidance: OX Alpha is useful for benchmarking your own tasks against what is achievable at free pricing. Running it against your own open-source code or synthetic evals is low-risk and informative. Keep customer data, proprietary source code, and credentials off it until the operator is publicly identified and the retention story is consistent.

The free window

The provider stated the free pricing window as approximately one week from August 20. Watch the OpenRouter listing for an identity disclosure or pricing announcement this week — that is when the cost-per-token story will become clear.

Why it matters: an 80% DeepSWE score from an anonymous model is worth tracking — if the operator surfaces and retention terms clarify, it becomes a serious option for coding tasks. For now: benchmark on it, do not ship with it.

Sources: Coding Model Ox Alpha Retains Every Prompt: You Cannot Name Company Holding Them — TechTimes · A free AI model is winning over developers. Nobody knows whose servers it runs on — The Next Web · Ox Alpha likely GLM-5.3: the mystery model fingerprint — Orca Router · Ox Alpha Free AI Model: Setup, Privacy and Cost — Wavect