Xiaomi has confirmed that a mysterious artificial intelligence model that appeared anonymously on a developer platform last week is its own creation, ending speculation that it was a test version of DeepSeek's next-generation system. The model, named Hunter Alpha, was unveiled on Wednesday as an early internal test build of MiMo-V2-Pro, a flagship AI model developed by Xiaomi's AI team, MiMo.
Hunter Alpha first surfaced on the AI gateway platform OpenRouter on 11 March without any developer attribution, leading the platform to describe it as a 'stealth model'. Its impressive capabilities quickly led many to believe it was DeepSeek-V4, the highly anticipated successor to DeepSeek's low-cost models. DeepSeek's earlier models had triggered a global tech stock selloff last year, prompting investors to question the necessity of spending billions on AI computing power by US firms.
MiMo is led by Luo Fuli, a former DeepSeek researcher. She commented on the rapid shift in the AI landscape, stating in an X post on Thursday: 'I call this a quiet ambush - not because we planned it, but because the shift from chat to agent paradigm happened so fast, even we barely believed it.' She added, 'People ask why we move so fast. I saw it firsthand building DeepSeek R1.'
MiMo-V2-Pro is designed to serve as the 'brain' of AI agents, tools that enable users to execute complex tasks with fewer human prompts and less supervision than traditional chatbots. It is set to partner with five major agent frameworks, including OpenClaw, offering a week of free access to developers worldwide. Following the announcement, Xiaomi's Hong Kong-listed shares surged by as much as 5.8 per cent on Thursday.
During tests conducted by Reuters last week, the Hunter Alpha chatbot identified itself as 'a Chinese AI model primarily trained in Chinese' and indicated its data extended back to May 2025, a knowledge cutoff point identical to that reported by DeepSeek's own chatbot. However, when questioned about its creator, the system declined to identify its developer, stating: 'I only know my name, my parameter scale and my context window length.'
Hunter Alpha's profile page describes it as a 1-trillion-parameter model with a context window of up to one million tokens. Nabil Haouam, an engineer specialising in AI agent systems, highlighted the model's unique appeal: 'The combination that stood out was Hunter Alpha's 1-million-token context paired with reasoning capability and free access.' MiMo reported that Hunter Alpha was rapidly adopted after its appearance, surpassing one trillion tokens in total usage and topping the leaderboard charts on OpenRouter.
