🥷 Mysterious Free Model Challenges Fable 5 and GPT-5.6

Somebody put a mysterious frontier coding model on the internet recently. Developers are running it on real work while the rest of the industry tries to work out whose it is. The last four models that arrived this way were all eventually claimed by Chinese labs. It costs nothing to run until the end of the week, and nobody has said what comes next. Let's dive in!

In today’s insights:

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

Evolving AI: Developers are adopting Ox Alpha faster than anyone can work out which lab released it.

Key Points:

OpenRouter lists the model under a provider called Stealth and discloses that the anonymous party behind it keeps every prompt sent through. The public DeepSWE leaderboard puts Claude Fable 5 at 69.7 percent and GPT-5.6 Sol at 72.7 percent, with Ox Alpha absent. Developers tested it regardless and pushed the model to number two on OpenCode in three days, where it drew 221,000 users and Anthropic's Claude Code now ranks second among its top apps.

Run Ox Alpha Now →

Anthropic and OpenAI charge for the coding models this one is being measured against, and a capable free challenger drags that price toward zero for everyone else. A solo developer can now hand an entire codebase to a top-tier model and pay nothing for the read. Open-source work is the safe place to spend the free week, and anything private belongs on a model with a name attached.

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Evolving AI: Nvidia is building a free model to fight DeepSeek abroad and its own customers at home.

Nvidia paid $6 billion for non-exclusive rights to Poolside's Model Factory and put a further $1 billion into the company at a $12 billion valuation. Exactly 109 Poolside staff move across while the three co-founders stay behind, and the licence plus minority stake structure keeps the deal clear of acquisition review. OpenAI and Anthropic sell access to closed frontier models and rank among the largest buyers of Nvidia chips, and Nemotron weights already sit on Hugging Face for anyone to download.

Anthropic keeps its strongest models locked inside its own servers, and open weights are the one way around that. The biggest Nemotron will need a data centre behind it, and the smaller open versions already run on one machine with no subscription and nothing sent to a company server. The wider effect lands later, when every paid lab prices against weights anyone can download for free.

We featured Claude Academy in Friday’s newsletter, and judging by the response, many of you found it usefu, so it deserves another mention. Anthropic has opened up its library of free courses and tutorials, covering everything from getting more out of Claude to Claude Code, MCP, and building with AI.

Our tip: bookmark it and pick one course relevant to how you actually work, it’s one of the better free AI learning resources we’ve seen recently.

Explore Claude Academy →

Evolving AI: AliExpress played a silent sound and recognised each visitor by the way their computer garbled it.

Alibaba runs two deliberately scrambled scripts on the AliExpress homepage, collina.js and fireyejs.js, which create a tone and drop the volume to nothing so it never actually plays. The computer still has to process that sound, and the scripts measure how it handled the job on the way out to the speakers, so muting the tab does not help because the page has no video or music player to mute.

Brave scrambles the audio result and blocks both scripts by default, and Firefox has made its own audio so uniform that 99% of its users now look the same, so which browser someone shops in changes how much of this works. Everything else the scripts collect still works, and they also look for the signs that give away automated software, a check that matters more as people start sending AI agents to shop for them.

QUICK HITS

🛰️ Starcloud raised $250M at a $2.3B valuation to put AI data centers in orbit, with Nvidia joining as an investor.

📒 AI accounting startup Rillet raised $100M and hit unicorn status in 48 hours after a routine board meeting.

☢️ Bill Gates-backed TerraPower will announce its first AI data center reactor this year, with construction starting 2027.

🔒 A Guidelight study found no frontier lab scored above 3 out of 5 on rogue-model containment, with Anthropic and Meta lowest.

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