OpenRouter Lists Crouton Alpha, a Free Stealth Model With a 1M-Token Context
The anonymous model takes text, images, video, files and audio and supports tool calling. Speculation that Meta built it is unconfirmed.
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OpenRouter has added Crouton Alpha, a free model from an anonymous provider, with a 1,048,576-token context window and multimodal input. Community clues point to Meta’s Muse family, but no maker has been confirmed.
Photo: blickpixel / Pixabay
At a glance
| Model ID | stealth/crouton-alpha |
| Listed | November 3, 2026 |
| Price | Free ($0 input and output) |
| Context | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Input | Text, images, video, files (e.g., PDFs), audio |
| Output | Text |
| Features | Tool calling, JSON-schema structured outputs, reasoning parameter |
| Maker | Anonymous; unconfirmed |
What OpenRouter listed
OpenRouter added Crouton Alpha to its catalog on November 3 under the model ID stealth/crouton-alpha. The listing describes it as “a lightweight model built for scalable coding, agentic, and multimodal workflows.”
OpenRouter positions the model for high-volume, repeated work. It is meant for agentic sub-tasks, tool use and document analysis. OpenRouter suggests pairing it with frontier reasoning models: the stronger model makes the plan, and Crouton Alpha carries out the bounded steps that turn plans and information into action.
What the listing confirms
According to its OpenRouter page, Crouton Alpha:
- costs nothing, at $0 per million input tokens and $0 per million output tokens;
- has a context window of 1,048,576 tokens;
- accepts text, images, video, files such as PDFs, and audio as input, and returns text;
- supports tool calling through the tools and tool_choice parameters;
- supports structured outputs through a JSON schema in response_format;
- supports OpenRouter’s reasoning parameter;
- is served by a single provider.
The model is not available through OpenRouter’s EU in-region routing. On OpenRouter’s overview of stealth models, Crouton Alpha is the newest of four and has the largest context window among them.
An anonymous provider
On its listing, OpenRouter says the model “is developed and operated by a third-party provider who has chosen to remain anonymous during this preview.” The company says it routes requests to the model and “is not its developer, owner, or provider.”
The listing also covers data handling. Prompts and completions “may be retained by the provider but are not used for training,” OpenRouter says, and other use is governed by its Stealth Model Terms. For developers, the trade-off is free access in exchange for sending data to a provider they cannot identify.
Is it Meta? Unconfirmed
Within hours of the listing, community observers began guessing at the maker. According to write-ups from CellCog and Coincamps, several pointed to Meta’s Muse family of models. The clues they cited were:
- regional restrictions that appear to match those on Meta’s model API;
- reasoning-effort settings similar to Muse listings;
- a rare Japanese word that Crouton Alpha gets wrong, as Muse models do.
Other evidence points the other way. The same tracker that raised those clues also reported that Crouton Alpha’s token counts do not match Meta’s models, and token counts are usually treated as a strong fingerprint.
No company has claimed Crouton Alpha, and Meta has not commented. DailyMech has not confirmed who built the model, and the Meta link remains speculation.
Using it
OpenRouter’s API is OpenAI-compatible, so developers can call the model through existing SDKs by setting the model ID to stealth/crouton-alpha. The listing also shows endpoints for OpenAI’s Responses API format and Anthropic’s Messages API format.
What to watch
Whether a company claims Crouton Alpha, what happens to its free pricing once the maker is named, and whether OpenRouter updates its data-retention terms when the preview ends.
More coverage is on our Artificial Intelligence hub.
How we reported this
We read the Crouton Alpha listing and OpenRouter’s stealth-models overview directly. The Meta speculation comes from third-party write-ups and is reported as unconfirmed. We left out speed, latency and token-volume figures because they change constantly.
Published and fact-checked November 4, 2026.
Sources
- OpenRouter: Crouton Alpha
- OpenRouter: Stealth models
- CellCog: What Is Crouton Alpha? OpenRouter’s Stealth Model, Graded
DailyMech used AI tools to help research and draft this article; it was fact-checked by our editors.