The cow comes home: China’s Internet celebrates Z.ai claiming ownership of Ox Alpha

Z.ai revealed that it had disguised its new GLM-5.3-Flash model as Ox Alpha. credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images Z.ai claimed ownership over the mysterious Ox Alpha model on Wednesday.

Chinese fans rejoiced, lauding Z.ai's new model and the startup's use of domestic AI chips.

The Chinese internet has been quick to heap praise on local AI companies making breakthroughs in the West.

One of China's leading AI labs has claimed the cow — aka the mysterious Ox Alpha model — and Chinese fans couldn't be happier.

In a Wednesday blog post, Z.ai said Ox Alpha had been 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 — sparking spirited debates online about which lab had dropped it.

"Before 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 of this traffic served on Chinese AI chips." Users on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, the country's version of X, rejoiced at the announcement.

As of noon on Thursday, a hashtag about Z.ai claiming ownership of Ox Alpha had thousands of posts under it, and was ranked among the top 20 hot topics on the platform.

It had been viewed more than 13 million times in under 24 hours.

One user whose location was listed as Beijing said the model is amazing, delivering strong performance at a low cost.

Another in Chongqing said that Ox Alpha's significance shows that Chinese open-source models have taken another step forward in the global developer market.

A user posting from Sichuan province lauded Z.ai for using domestically produced chips, saying that 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, too.