A powerful artificial intelligence model that appeared anonymously on a developer platform last week has ignited speculation that Chinese startup DeepSeek is covertly testing its next-generation system.
Dubbed Hunter Alpha, the free model was posted on the AI gateway OpenRouter on 11 March without any developer attribution. It was quickly labelled a 'stealth model' by the platform. During tests by Reuters, the chatbot identified itself as a Chinese AI model trained primarily in Chinese, with training data up to May 2025 – the same cutoff reported by DeepSeek's existing chatbot. However, it declined to name its creator, stating it only knew its name, parameter scale and context window length.
Hunter Alpha's profile describes a 1-trillion-parameter model with a context window of up to 1 million tokens. These specifications match expectations for DeepSeek's reported V4 model, which Chinese media suggest could launch as early as April. Developers pointed to similarities in reasoning style and memory capacity as strong signals, though some cautioned that evidence remains inconclusive. Anonymous model launches are not uncommon on OpenRouter; a similar model called Pony Alpha appeared in February before being confirmed as part of Zhipu AI's GLM-5 system.
The model was rapidly adopted, processing over 160 billion tokens as of Sunday, with much of the activity coming from software development tools and AI agent frameworks. A notice on its profile page states that all prompts and completions are logged by the provider and may be used to improve the model, a common practice for obtaining unbiased feedback.
