The mystery is solved... and the answer is 40x cheaper than Claude
Zhipu's GLM 5.3 Flash anonymously dominated Open Router and costs 40x less than Claude
“at its peak, OX Alpha accounted for nearly a third of Open Router's entire weekly traffic”
Chinese lab Zhipu anonymously released GLM 5.3 Flash as 'Ox Alpha' on Open Router, where it served 42 trillion tokens in its first 6 days and peaked at nearly a third of Open Router's entire weekly traffic. The 320B-parameter multimodal mixture-of-experts model is MIT-licensed with weights on Hugging Face, and at 40x cheaper than Claude it represents a major cost-competitiveness signal from China. The episode also exposed a significant enterprise security risk: developers unknowingly routed proprietary code and Claude Code traffic through an unidentified foreign model.