The Chinese internet is looking to the country's weirdest viral movie for hints at Ox Alpha's origins

A Chinese cow movie has become the prime lead in a mystery about an anonymous AI model.

Wang Gang/VCG via Getty Images A mysterious free model, Ox Alpha, is making waves after it popped up on OpenRouter.

Chinese netizens have linked this mystery AI model to China's viral movie "Niu Lai." Beyond the cow references, it remains unclear if the model has Chinese origins.

The internet is hard at work to uncover the origins of a mysterious model .

Last week, a new model named Ox Alpha popped up on OpenRouter.

The model — uploaded by an anonymous third-party provider — is temporarily free with near-unlimited usage.

Early tests from developers suggest it performs well on coding and long-running AI agent tasks.

Now, people on the Chinese internet are looking at a weird, low-budget Chinese film about a cow — and wondering if the model's name could be a dead giveaway about its origins.

Over the weekend, users on Weibo, China's version of X, pointed out that the model's name contains the word "Ox." That led other people on the platform to nickname the model "Niu Lai," the title of a Chinese animated movie that became one of the country's biggest internet memes this summer.

The movie, released on August 5, has a title that translates to "Here Comes the Ox." The bizarre flick — voiced and produced by a mother-son duo — is about a timid newborn calf that follows a songbird into an abstract dream sequence.

Its rudimentary 3D animation and odd plot put some of its early viewers off; fewer than 300 tickets were sold during its first 10 days in theaters, according to local media reports.

However, as clips and jokes about its unpolished quality exploded online, the movie turned into a nationwide sensation, with filmgoers flocking to cinemas out of sheer curiosity about how bad it could be.

The cow memes — including an unintentionally hilarious moment in which the calf bellows plaintively for its mother — have since flooded Chinese social media.

And that's meant big money for the movie, too.