OpenRouter launches free 1M-context multimodal stealth model Crouton Alpha

OpenRouter released stealth/crouton-alpha on 3 November 2026, making a new multimodal reasoning model from an undisclosed provider available at $0 per million input and output tokens during alpha testing. OpenRouter routes every request directly to the single upstream host, which neither logs prompts and completions nor trains on user traffic.

According to OpenRouter’s model specification and API metadata, Crouton Alpha targets high-volume, repetitive agentic subtasks, tool calling and multi-document analysis. It supports a 1,048,576-token context window and up to 943,718 maximum completion tokens across five input modalities: text, images, video, audio and files, returning text outputs with structured output schemas and tool-choice controls. Reasoning tokens are mandatory on every call, defaulting to max across six configurable effort levels (minimal, low, medium, high, xhigh and max) across OpenRouter’s chat completions, completions, messages and responses endpoints.

OpenRouter’s live telemetry dashboard, which renders interactive HTML charts rather than downloadable static figures, reports a median throughput of 52 tokens per second and a median time to first token of 2.07 seconds, with coding harnesses such as Hermes Agent, Claude Code and DeepSeek Harness already driving billions of tokens of early traffic. Neither OpenRouter nor the upstream lab has disclosed the model’s creator, parameter count or post-alpha pricing.