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, after it fueled speculation that startup DeepSeek was quietly testing its next-generation system. 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 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. 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 point that was reported by DeepSeek’s own chatbot. Hunter Alpha’s profile page describes it as a 1-trillion-parameter model, and the system advertises a context window of up to one million tokens. 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.