For days, one of the most popular AI models of the week had no known maker. Ox Alpha was free to try, impressive at coding, and mysterious enough to set developers guessing about which major AI lab was behind it. Then Z.ai revealed itself. The Beijing AI company said this week that Ox Alpha was the name it had used to anonymously test GLM-5.3-Flash, its latest open-weight model, on OpenRouter and OpenCode. The stunt has put the newly public company in the spotlight as China’s AI race heats up. Z.ai is up against DeepSeek, Moonshot AI — the company behind Kimi — and Alibaba’s Qwen team. They’re competing on performance and price, while trying to make the most of limited computing power. what is your experience with Z. ai models?
