Zhipu AI takes ownership of Ox Alpha: New GLM version natively supports images and videos, to be open-sourced tonight.

Beating AI News Insight: Zhipu AI has confirmed that Ox Alpha is a new version of its GLM series, with the model’s weights set to be released publicly tonight. Earlier, the community had already identified Ox Alpha as Zhipu’s work via clues such as API error logs and tokenizer details, and this has now been officially verified. Ox Alpha anonymously launched on OpenRouter over the weekend, focusing on programming and long-duration agent tasks, while supporting inputs of text, images, and videos. Shortly after its launch, it rose to become the most-used model on OpenRouter, with usage volume twice that of DeepSeek. OpenRouter described this as the largest model release in the platform’s history. Multimodality is a notable shift here: Zhipu previously separated its core GLM models from GLM-V visual models – for instance, GLM-5 only supported text, while images and videos were handled by models like GLM-5V-Turbo. This time, Ox Alpha is confirmed as a new GLM version that can process both images and videos. If the final official model name drops the "V" suffix, it would mark Zhipu’s move to merge its two model lines. Ox Alpha will stay free for one week; post-period pricing has not been announced.