Latest / Frontier models and safety

Model releaseFrontierChinaReported

Meituan unveils LongCat-2.0, the model behind the stealth ‘Owl Alpha’ on OpenRouter

See how this story connects

Delivery company Meituan unveiled LongCat-2.0, a 1.6-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with a 1-million-token context under an MIT licence, revealing it as the anonymous ‘Owl Alpha’ that had reached OpenRouter’s global top three by token volume. Full weights were promised later; API prices are $0.75 and $2.95 per million tokens with free cache hits.

Why it matters

A Chinese consumer company produced one of the most used coding models on a major developer platform.

When
29 Jun 2026
ID
WTA-N-2026-0218
Where
China
Who
Meituan

Summary by wheresthe.ai, from VentureBeat. We could not open the primary document, so it is marked Reported. Checked against the source on 10 Oct 2026.

Source copy: download the page as saved on 18 Oct 2026 (PDF). Also held by the Internet Archive.

Earlier in this Storyline: What led hereMiniMax releases M3, a 1-million-token multimodal model for coding agents

Cite this story

WTA-N-2026-0218: “Meituan unveils LongCat-2.0, the model behind the stealth ‘Owl Alpha’ on OpenRouter.” wheresthe.ai, 29 Jun 2026. https://wheresthe.ai/d/cn-meituan-longcat-2-open-2026-06/ (source: VentureBeat).

Spotted an error? Email [email protected].