Zhipu AI Confirms Development of Mysterious Model 'Ox Alpha', Stock Surges About 10%

Chinese artificial intelligence company Zhipu AI (02513-HK) confirmed on Thursday (27th) that the mysterious AI model 'Ox Alpha'—which went viral online and is known as 'Niu Lai' in Chinese communities—was independently developed by the company. This announcement boosted market confidence in Chinese AI firms' competitiveness, causing its Hong Kong-listed shares to surge 9.7% to HK$1,130 at one point, maintaining gains above 9% and closing up 12.6%.

'Ox Alpha' was anonymously launched on the AI platform OpenRouter on August 20 and immediately topped the platform's all-time largest release usage leaderboard. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison praised its performance as 'impressive.' Zhipu AI stated that the model's official name is GLM-5.3-Flash, with the codename inspired by the popular Chinese film 'Niu Lai.'

GLM-5.3-Flash is a reasoning model designed specifically for coding and intelligent agent tasks. It supports multimodal inputs including text, images, and video, features a 1 million token context window, and was tested entirely on AI chips manufactured in China.

Zhipu AI plans to release the model weights to encourage developer-driven secondary development. It is priced at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, positioning it as a low-cost, high-efficiency model alongside DeepSeek and directly challenging paid services from U.S. companies like Anthropic.

This 'anonymous release' strategy emulates approaches used by Alibaba and Xiaomi, offering greater experimental freedom for new services. Zhipu AI will release its first half-year financial results since going public next Monday.