A new mystery AI model that emerged last week has been revealed as the creation of Xiaomi, the smartphone and EV firm based in China.

The model’s anonymous release on a developer platform galvanised much speculation that it could be DeepSeeks new V4 model the company had teased mere weeks earlier.

Released on OpenRouter, an AI gateway platform, on 11 March, the new free model was described as “stealth mode” by the platform with no affiliation and the name “Hunter Alpha.”

The model was developed by MiMo, the AI team at Xiaomi, led by Lou Fuli, a former researcher for DeepSeek.

Fuli described the model as an “early internal test build of MiMo-V2-Pro,” Xiaomi’s flagship AI model which is mean to rely on fewer human prompts and interventions compared to a standard chatbot, acting as an AI agent’s “brain.”

“I call this a quiet ambush – not because we planned it, but because the shift from chat to agent ​paradigm happened so fast, even we barely believed it,” Luo said in a social media post.

She added: “People ask why we move so fast. I saw it firsthand building DeepSeek R1.”

MiMo-V2-Pro will now offer a week of free access to developers around the world in five partnerships with agent frameworks, including the rapidly expanding OpenClaw.

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The Hunter Alpha revelation lead to a 5.8% boost to Xiaomi’s shares, which are listed on the Hong Kong stock market.

The AI model’s profile page says that it is a 1-trillion parameter model with a context window of up to one million tokens, which aligned with expectations for DeepSeek’ upcoming V4 model.

The stealth mode launch, which allows developers to launch models on AI model platforms without company attribution, is not uncommon, allowing developers to receive unbiased feedback from other developers prior to an official launch.

Users of Hunter Alpha were given notice that any usage would be used by the anonymous provider to improve and train the model.

MiMo has said that the adoption of the stealth model was rapid, amassing a million tokens since its release and climbing the OpenRouter charts to the top.