Union Alpha on OpenRouter: Tests and Reviews

On the same Three.js procedural 3D robot siege task, Union Alpha used 44,358 tokens at $0 versus Ox Alpha's 127,064 tokens at $0.57, with the author saying Union writes code directly while Ox thinks first and is more verbose; Ox Alpha has been revealed as GLM-5.3-Flash.

A chart shows the anonymous model ranking high on DeepSWE with one of the best cost profiles on the chart, leaving the author baffled.

Two users measured 800 tokens/s on a first run dropping to just over 300 on a second, and 300 tokens/s respectively, calling it comparable to DeepSeek v4.1 flash and free without limits.

The author found Union Alpha extremely slow inside OpenRouter at a 262K context window, but its performance-to-cost ratio on DeepSWE lands between Opus 5 and GLM-5.3, and speculates it may be a GLM-family model.

The author's testing suggests Union Alpha uses a llama3 vocabulary, a Qwen2-VL-style vision tower, a measured context window of at least 187K, hidden reasoning billing, and ignores tool_choice.

A user ran the classic pelican benchmark on Union Alpha and found the feet track the pedals, the wheels and crank animate, and the scarf flutters, leading them to suspect a stealth model from a Chinese lab.

In an AI/ML API 3D scene rendering comparison, Union Alpha used a third of the tokens of Ox Alpha, and OpenRouter traffic hit about 1.96B tokens on day one.

Testers report DeepSWE around 74 and Terminal-Bench near GPT-6 Astra, but many say it is very slow at 7.6 tok/s, with one hour for 13 tool calls, and it hides its reasoning.

A Turkish post lists the stealth model as built for research, coding and agent workflows, free on OpenRouter, with prompts and outputs not used for training.

The anonymous Union Alpha model is shown at roughly 51% on Terminal-Bench v4.0 at about $1.50 per task, with 262K context and image input, positioned for agentic coding alongside GPT-6 Astra.

Union Alpha is now free in Cline with 256K context, multimodal input and agentic coding, and scores 73% on DeepSWE at around $0.65 according to OpenRouter.

According to opencode data not verified by ArtificialAnlys, Union Alpha scores frontier-level points on Terminal-Bench 4.0 and is priced in the most attractive quadrant, beating the Pareto frontier like GPT-6 Astra.