A powerful artificial intelligence model that appeared anonymously on a developer platform last week has sparked speculation that Chinese startupDeepSeek may be quietly testing its next-generation system ahead of an official launch.The free model, called Hunter Alpha, surfaced on the AI gateway platform OpenRouter on March 11 without any developer attribution and was later described by the platform as a "stealth model." During tests conducted by Reuters, the Hunter Alpha chatbot described itself as "a Chinese AI model primarily trained in Chinese" and said its training data extended to May 2025, the same knowledge cutoff point reported by DeepSeek's own…