The Trump Administration’s ban on global access to Anthropic’s Mythos and its more restricted version, Fable 5, remained in force as Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 reportedly unveiled Tulongfeng, an AI tool it says can go head-to-head with Mythos. The result is a familiar hierarchy dressed up as policy: access to frontier models is being rationed from above, while companies and governments at the bottom scramble for substitutes.
Who Gets to Access the Machines
Earlier the same week, Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based AI startup, launched Fugu, a model named after the Japanese word for blowfish. Sakana said the frontier AI model “stands shoulder-to-shoulder with leading models like Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos Preview” and is designed for agents, with an ability to orchestrate access to other models through their APIs. The company’s website advertises “delivering frontier capability without the risk of export controls.”
A Sakana AI spokesperson said the release of Fugu was “entirely coincidental,” adding, “Sakana Fugu is something we have been building since last year — the research behind it was presented at ICLR this spring, and it reflects an approach that is central to how we deliver frontier-level value at Sakana AI. We were confident in the product on its own merits; the timing simply happened to coincide with a moment that brought it more attention than we expected.”
The timing may have been accidental, but the pressure underneath it is not. Sakana, co-founded in 2023 by former Google researchers Ren Ito, Llion Jones and David Ha, makes affordable generative AI models that work well with small datasets and are optimized for the Japanese language and culture. The company is targeting Fugu at Japanese businesses and government agencies looking to reduce their exposure to tightening export controls, but it is not yet proclaiming a lasting shift away from U.S. AI in Asia.
The spokesperson said, “U.S. models remain important to Asia,” a view consistent with remarks co-founder Ren Ito made at the G7 summit in Evian last week, where AI access and export controls were one of the central topics. “We’d characterize the current moment in those terms rather than as a permanent realignment toward any one set of players.”
The Gatekeepers and Their Workarounds
In an op-ed published in Project Syndicate last week, Ren Ito urged the US federal government to consider that its “first priority should be to preserve access” for America’s closest allies, and argued that “AI should not become a technology that is hoarded; it should be one that is developed together.” The language is polished, but the underlying problem is plain: a handful of institutions and states decide who gets access, who waits, and who pays for the privilege.
David Ha, co-founder and CEO of Sakana, said Fugu is designed to coordinate agent usage among many models. “Orchestration Models are the next frontier, beyond bigger models,” he wrote on X. He said relying on a single provider for national infrastructure is a risk the recent export controls made impossible to ignore. “Access to top models can disappear overnight,” he wrote. “Collective intelligence is the practical hedge against this concentration of power.”
That concentration is exactly what the export order has sharpened. While Sakana positioned Fugu as a hedge strategy to preserve access to frontier AI rather than replace it, China’s 360 was not hedging. The Chinese firm reportedly unveiled two AI security tools. Tulongfeng is designed to automatically discover software vulnerabilities, and Yitianzhen is built to automate cyber defence and incident response.
According to Reuters, 360’s founder Zhou Hongyi described vulnerability-finding AI as a national strategic asset and flagged what he called the risk of “one-way transparency,” a situation in which some actors could access advanced vulnerability-detection capabilities while others could not. That is the language of a system where power is not shared, only managed.
What the Market Calls a Gap
Anthropic had been on a historic growth trajectory, and the US AI lab said its run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion in May 2026. How much of that depends on Asian enterprise customers is not publicly known. In the weeks since the export order took effect, at least two companies, one in Tokyo and one in Beijing, have stepped into the space it left behind.
Even if US companies could win back trust should the ban ever end, local alternatives trained to better understand local language and nuance are already filling the gap. 360 did not respond to a request for comment.
The pattern is hard to miss: export controls, corporate strategy, and state-backed competition are all being used to sort the world into permitted users and excluded users. The people and institutions at the bottom are left to adapt, while the decisions that shape access are made elsewhere.