OpenRouter and OpenCode released a multimodal AI called Union Alpha for agentic coding and research that scores 74% on the DeepSWE benchmark. The stealth model is free for one week starting September 16 and offers a 256K context window along with image support and tool calling. OpenRouter reported early traffic of approximately 1.96 billion tokens, and OpenCode advertised a daily capacity of 5T tokens for the service.

Early users allege the system is a model router rather than a new AI, claiming it switches between Llama-3.3-70b, Qwen 3.6 35b-a3b, and GLM 5.3 Flash. These reports suggest DeepSeek v4 Flash serves as a judge to route requests when the system is under load. OpenRouter announced additional capacity arrived on September 18 to resolve initial stability issues encountered by developers.