Mystery stealth model Crouton Alpha appears on OpenRouter with 1M context, free tier

Gregory-Wolf · reddit · 2026-11-04

A stealth model Crouton Alpha has appeared on OpenRouter with no announced vendor: 1.05M context, free pricing, released Nov 3. It's described as a lightweight model built for scalable coding, agentic, and multimodal workflows — ideal for agentic sub-tasks, tool use, and document analysis at high volume, meant to be paired with frontier reasoning models that plan while it executes bounded steps. The naming and positioning are fueling speculation about who is behind it.

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