BEIJING, March 18 (Reuters) - A powerful artificial

intelligence model that appeared anonymously on a developer

platform last week was revealed on Wednesday to be from Chinese

smartphone and EV giant Xiaomi ( XIACF ), after it fueled

speculation that startup DeepSeekwas quietly testing its

next-generation system ahead of a launch.

The release of DeepSeek's low-cost models DeepSeek-V3 and R1

triggered a global tech stock selloff last year, causing

investors to question whether U.S. AI firms needed to spend

billions of dollars on AI computing power. Since then, there has

been a great deal of interest in DeepSeek-V4, a next-generation

model that has yet to be released.

The mysterious free model, called Hunter Alpha, surfaced on

the AI gateway platform OpenRouter on March 11 without any

developer attribution and was later described by the platform as

a "stealth model."

Xiaomi's ( XIACF ) AI model team MiMo, run by former DeepSeek

researcher Luo Fuli, on Wednesday said Hunter Alpha was an

"early internal test build of MiMo-V2-Pro," a model designed to

serve as the "brain" of AI agents, tools that can allow users to

execute complex tasks with fewer human prompts and supervision

when compared with a chatbot.

Xiaomi's ( XIACF ) release comes at a time when OpenClaw, an

open-source agent framework, is being rapidly adopted by users

of all stripes in China.

THE MYSTERIOUS CHINESE MODEL

During tests conducted by Reuters, the Hunter Alpha chatbot

described itself as "a Chinese AI model primarily trained in

Chinese" and said its data extended back to May 2025, the same

knowledge cutoff pointthat was reported by DeepSeek's own

chatbot.

When asked about its creator, however, the system declined

to identify its developer.

"I only know my name, my parameter scale and my context

window length," the chatbot said.

Hunter Alpha's profile page describes it as a

1-trillion-parameter model, meaning it was trained using roughly

one trillion adjustable values that determine how the system

processes language and generates responses.

The system also advertises a context window of up to one

million tokens, a measure of how much text an AI model can

process or remember during a single interaction. A token roughly

corresponds to a short piece of text, such as part of a word.

"The combination that stood out was Hunter Alpha's

1-million-token context paired with reasoning capability and

free access," said Nabil Haouam, an engineer who builds AI agent

systems.

"Most frontier models with that context window come with

real cost at scale," he added.

Those specifications resembled expectations in local media

for DeepSeek's next-generation V4 model, which Chinese outlets

have reported could launch as early as April.

Umur Ozkul, who runs independent AI benchmark tests, said

speculation connecting the model to DeepSeek was understandable

given the timing and capabilities advertised.

STEALTH TESTING

Anonymous model launches are not unusual, as platforms like

OpenRouter allow developers to send queries to dozens of AI

models through a single interface, making them a popular testing

ground for new systems.

An anonymous model called Pony Alpha appeared on OpenRouter

in February before Chinese firm Zhipu AI confirmed it was part

of its GLM-5 system five days later.

A notice on Hunter Alpha's profile page said all prompts and

completions for the model "are logged by the provider and may be

used to improve the model," underscoring the industry-wide

practice of using stealth model launches for unbiased feedback.

The model was adopted rapidly after appearing on the

platform, surpassing one trillion tokens in total usage and

topping the leaderboard charts on OpenRouter, according to MiMo.