Crouton Alpha: a free, anonymous 1M-token model lands on OpenRouter

A new anonymous model appeared on OpenRouter on 3 November 2026. Crouton Alpha, model ID stealth/crouton-alpha, is free to call and accepts up to 1,048,576 tokens per request, the largest context among OpenRouter's current stealth models (OpenRouter).

What OpenRouter says it is for

OpenRouter describes it as "a lightweight model built for scalable coding, agentic, and multimodal workflows", aimed at agentic sub-tasks, tool use and document analysis in "high-volume, repeated work". The suggested setup is to pair it with a frontier reasoning model that plans, while Crouton Alpha executes "the bounded steps" (OpenRouter).

The listing shows text, image, video, file and audio input with text output, plus support for tools, structured output and a reasoning-effort setting (OpenRouter).

Who built it: unknown

Crouton Alpha "is developed and operated by a third-party provider who has chosen to remain anonymous during this preview". OpenRouter only routes requests and says it is not the developer, owner or provider (OpenRouter). Stealth listings like this are usually how labs test a model before naming it, but nothing published so far says which lab is behind this one, and guessing would be speculation.

The catch before you send it real work

Two lines on the listing matter more than the price (OpenRouter):

• Prompts and completions "may be retained by the provider", though they are not used for training.
• All other use falls under OpenRouter's Stealth Model Terms.

Free is a preview price, not a promise. Do not send it client data, secrets or proprietary code you would not want an unnamed company to keep. For throwaway sub-tasks in a vibe-coding loop, such as summarising docs or running tool calls on public data, it is a cheap way to test whether a light model handles the grunt work your main model is currently paying for.