Union Alpha: a free 262K agentic coding model, for one week only
An anonymous 262K-context model on OpenRouter and OpenCode — multimodal, tool-calling, free for a week, no training on your data. Plus: how stale is your AI?
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What dropped: a free, frontier-class stealth model
Union Alpha appeared on OpenRouter and OpenCode on Sept 16 with no named lab behind it — a multimodal model pitched for research, coding, and agentic workflows at frontier-level general-purpose performance. It's free to call right now, and OpenCode says it's free for the next week.
The specs that matter for agents
262K-token context (262,144 in, up to 131,072 out), image input, and tool calling — enough to drop a whole repo or a long spec into a single run. OpenCode is positioning it squarely at agentic coding.
Free, but read the fine print
The provider is anonymous; OpenRouter only routes to it. OpenCode says there's no training on your data, and OpenRouter notes prompts may be retained but not used for training. Throughput is modest (~11 tok/s, ~4.9s latency on the stealth route), and 'free for a week' means the meter starts eventually.
Build this weekend: a long-context repo agent for $0
With 262K context, tool calling, and zero cost for a week, wire Union Alpha into OpenCode or any OpenRouter client and let an agent read an entire codebase, plan, and edit — a free way to test whether a stealth model can stand in for your paid coding model.
Elsewhere: a one-glance staleness check for 20 models
A new Show HN tool, 'How Stale Is Your AI?', charts release date against training cutoff for 20 popular models on a single page — a fast sanity check before you trust a model on anything recent.