A powerful, anonymous AI model quietly appeared on the developer platform OpenRouter last week and promptly sent the tech world into a speculative frenzy that it's a stealth test run from Chinese AI startup DeepSeek . The model, called Hunter Alpha, surfaced on March 11 with no developer attribution attached. According to Reuters , when tested directly, the chatbot described itself as a Chinese AI model with a training data cutoff of May 2025 — the same cutoff as DeepSeek 's own chatbot. When asked who built it, the system declined to answer. Neither DeepSeek nor OpenRouter has claimed it, and neither responded to Reuters' request for comment. The company released its latest models this past December: DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, both free to use. The company positioned V3.2 as an everyday AI assistant on par with OpenAI's GPT-5, while V3.2-Speciale was aimed at more advanced reasoning tasks, with DeepSeek claiming the model posted gold-medal results on the International Math Olympiad.…