One of China’s leading AI labs has claimed the cow – also known as the mysterious Ox Alpha model – and Chinese fans couldn’t be happier.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Z.ai said Ox Alpha was a free-to-use preview of its new GLM-5.3-Flash model. The model had appeared on OpenRouter and OpenCode on August 20, but no one claimed it for days, leading to spirited debates online about which lab had dropped it.
“Prior to release, we tested GLM-5.3-Flash anonymously as ox-alpha on OpenCode and OpenRouter to gather user feedback,” the company wrote in its blog post. “It quickly became the most popular model of the week, with all this traffic handled via Chinese AI chips.”
Users on Chinese social media platform Weibo, China’s version of X, welcomed the announcement. By Thursday afternoon, a hashtag about Z.ai claiming ownership of Ox Alpha had thousands of posts and was in the top 20 trending topics on the platform. Within 24 hours the film was viewed more than 13 million times.
One user whose location was Beijing said the model is great and delivers strong performance at a low cost. Another in Chongqing said the significance of Ox Alpha shows that Chinese open source models have taken another step forward in the global developer market.
A user from Sichuan province praised Z.ai for using domestically produced chips, saying the example shows that Chinese chips can efficiently support large-scale AI use. Another poster from Sichuan called the model “ridiculously cheap.”
It’s not just internet users in China who have praised the model; executives in the US have done so too. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said on X that he tried the model and found it “very impressive.”
Chinese internet users have been laser-focused on Ox Alpha since the model debuted last week – and all the mystery has come with a dash of humor, too. Over the weekend, Weibo users nicknamed the model “Niu Lai,” the title of a Chinese animated film released in August that spawned a slew of memes online in the country.
GLM-5.3-Flash is the latest Chinese AI model that is also making waves outside China. Another recent example is the Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI, which was launched Kimi K3 in July, an open-weight model that can rival the capabilities of models from OpenAI and Anthropic at a lower cost.
And Alibaba on Wednesday released its latest Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model, an efficiency-focused open-weight model that promises lower training and inference costs.
Weibo users have historically heaped praise on Chinese AI labs that have made breakthroughs in the West. For example, when Kimi K3 had its moment in July, users called The founder of Moonshot AIYang Zhilin, a ‘millennial genius’, with some even commenting on his youthful ‘baby face’.
