Fireship IDs the mystery model behind 42 trillion tokens

OpenRouter ran an anonymous model under the label "Ox Alpha," and it pulled in 42 trillion tokens over six days. A large share of the platform's agentic traffic rerouted to that unnamed model, on price alone, before anyone knew what it was.

Fireship's video identifying GLM-5.3-Flash, posted September 1, names Zhipu as the maker. The model is Chinese, open-weights, and priced 40 times cheaper than Claude.

For teams building agent pipelines that call out to LLM APIs, the routing here wasn't loyal to a brand. It picked the cheapest option that cleared the bar, and the volume moved before most users knew the name behind it.

What the video doesn't settle is whether that traffic stays on GLM-5.3-Flash now that the name is public. Some of it may have been people testing an unlabeled option out of curiosity rather than production workloads that persist. Fireship doesn't break the volume down by use case, so there's no way to tell exploration from a durable shift in spend.

Whatever preference people claim to have for a given model, 42 trillion tokens of real usage didn't check the label first.