On Wednesday, Chinese cybersecurity company 360 reportedly announced Tulongfeng, an AI tool that can take on Anthropic’s Mythos. This is a cybersecurity-focused AI model that is reportedly so powerful that the Trump administration currently bans it and its more restricted version, Fable 5, from being in the hands of non-Americans.
Earlier in the same week, Tokyo-based AI startup Sakana AI launched a model called Fugu, named after the Japanese word for blowfish. The company says this Frontier AI model is “on par with leading models like Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos Preview.” It is also designed for agents and has the ability to coordinate access to other models via an API.
Two new Asian models have been released as the US government’s ban drags on. The order blocking Anthropic’s worldwide access to Mythos and Fable occurred two weeks ago.
A Sakana AI spokesperson told TechCrunch that the release of the new model was “completely coincidental,” but that didn’t stop the company from taking advantage of the moment. The company’s website touts its ability to “deliver frontier capabilities without the risk of export controls.”
“Sakana Fugu is something we have been building for the past year, and the research behind it was presented at ICLR this spring, reflecting the core approach of how to deliver frontier-level value with fish AI. We were confident in the merits of the product itself, and the timing was just coincidental as it garnered more attention than we expected,” a spokesperson said of the launch during the Myth/Fable export embargo.
Co-founded in 2023 by former Google researchers Ren Ito, Lion Jones, and David Ha, Sakana creates affordable generative AI models that work well with small datasets and are optimized for Japanese language and culture.
The company is targeting Fugu with Japanese companies and government agencies looking to reduce the impact of tighter export controls, but has not yet declared a permanent shift away from US-made AI in Asia.
“The US model remains important for Asia,” the spokesperson said, echoing comments made by co-founder Ren Ito at the G7 summit in Evian last week, where access to AI and export controls were central to the agenda. “We would like to characterize the current moment in those terms, rather than as a permanent realignment for specific players.”
Sakana co-founder Ren Ito elaborated on that view in an op-ed published in Project Syndicate last week. He urged the U.S. federal government, which believes “maintaining access should be a top priority” to America’s closest allies, that “AI should not be a technology to be hoarded; it should be a technology to be developed together.”
Sakana co-founder and CEO David Ha said Fugu is more than just a land grab at a vulnerable time for U.S. competitors. Designed to coordinate agent usage across many models.
“Orchestration models are the next frontier beyond larger-scale models,” he wrote about X. He argued that relying on a single provider for national infrastructure was a risk that could no longer be ignored due to recent export restrictions.
“Access to top models can be lost overnight,” he writes. “Collective intelligence is a practical safeguard against this concentration of power.”
Tokyo-based Sakana positioned Fugu as a hedging strategy, a way to maintain access to Frontier AI rather than replacing it, while China’s 360 was not hedging.
The Chinese company has reportedly announced two AI security tools. Tulongfeng is designed to automatically detect software vulnerabilities, and Yitianzhen is built to automate cyber defense and incident response.
However, the product announcement came with a message. According to Reuters, 360 founder Hongyi Chou described vulnerability discovery AI as a national strategic asset and warned of what he called the risk of “one-way transparency,” a situation in which some actors have access to advanced vulnerability detection capabilities while others do not.
Anthropic has been on a historic growth trajectory. US AI Lab announced that its run-rate revenue exceeded $47 billion in May 2026. It is not publicly known how much of that depends on business customers in Asia.
But in the weeks since the export order went into effect, at least two companies, one in Tokyo and one in Beijing, have stepped into the space left by the order. Even if U.S. companies are able to regain trust when the ban ends, local alternatives trained to better understand local language and nuances are already filling the gap.
360 did not respond to a request for comment.
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