Most AI platforms lead with which model powers them. 9xAI deliberately doesn't — and that's not an oversight.
Look at most AI product homepages today and you'll usually see a model name or logo somewhere prominent — a badge indicating which underlying model powers the product, often treated as a key selling point in itself. 9xAI's homepage deliberately doesn't do this, and it's worth explaining why, because it's a genuine design choice rather than an oversight.
When a product's marketing leads with a specific model's name, it's implicitly telling you that the product's value is mostly that model's value — that what you're really buying is access to a particular AI lab's technology, with the surrounding product as a thin wrapper. For some products, that's an honest description. For a platform built around routing across multiple models based on what each task actually needs, it would be actively misleading.
What a user of the Engineering copilot cares about is whether it correctly catches a P&ID mismatch. What a user of the Finance copilot cares about is whether it correctly flags a budget anomaly. Which specific underlying model produced that correct answer, in that specific moment, is an implementation detail managed by the Model Router — genuinely useful for us to reason about internally, and genuinely irrelevant to the value being delivered to the person asking the question.
Leading with a model name on the homepage would mean asking users to care about exactly the detail that matters least to whether the platform actually helps them.
This positioning choice isn't separate from 9xAI's broader commitment to model independence — it's the most visible expression of it. A platform that genuinely doesn't depend on any single model for its core value proposition shouldn't market itself as if it did. Not naming models on the homepage is simply honest marketing, given how the platform is actually built underneath.
None of this means model choice doesn't matter — it matters enormously, which is exactly why the Model Router exists to make that choice carefully, task by task, rather than making it once, permanently, in a marketing decision.