On Wednesday, Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 reportedly introduced Tulongfeng, an AI tool it claims can compete directly with Anthropic’s Mythos. That’s the cybersecurity-focused AI model said to be so advanced that the Trump Administration has currently banned it, along with its more restricted version, Fable 5, from being used by non-Americans. Earlier in the same week, Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup, launched Fugu—a model named after the Japanese word for blowfish. The company asserts that this frontier AI model “stands shoulder-to-shoulder with leading models like Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos Preview.” It is also built for agents, with the ability to orchestrate access to other models through their APIs.

These two new Asian AI products arrive amid the ongoing U.S. government ban. The order preventing Anthropic from providing global access to Mythos and Fable was issued two weeks ago. Anthropic’s website advertises “delivering frontier capability without the risk of export controls.”

“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,” a company spokesperson said regarding the launch during the Mythos/Fable export ban.

Sakana, co-founded in 2023 by former Google researchers Ren Ito, Llion Jones, and David Ha, creates affordable generative AI models that perform well with small datasets and are optimized for Japanese language and culture. While the company is targeting Fugu at Japanese businesses and government agencies seeking to reduce their exposure to tightening export controls, it isn’t yet proclaiming a lasting shift away from U.S. AI in Asia. “U.S. models remain important to Asia,” the spokesperson noted, 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 central topics. “We’d characterize the current moment in those terms rather than as a permanent realignment toward any one set of players.”

Sakana co-founder Ren Ito expanded on that perspective in an op-ed published in Project Syndicate last week. He urged the U.S. federal government to consider that its “first priority should be to preserve access” for America’s closest allies, arguing that “AI should not become a technology that is hoarded; it should be one that is developed together.”

David Ha, co-founder and CEO of Sakana, described Fugu as more than just a land grab during a vulnerable moment for U.S. competitors. It is designed to coordinate agent usage across many models. “Orchestration Models are the next frontier, beyond bigger models,” he wrote on X. Relying on a single provider for national infrastructure, he argued, is a risk that recent export controls have made impossible to ignore. “Access to top models can disappear overnight,” he wrote. “Collective intelligence is the practical hedge against this concentration of power.”

While Tokyo-based Sakana positioned Fugu as a hedge strategy—a way to preserve access to frontier AI, not replace it—China’s 360 wasn’t 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 defense and incident response. The product launch, however, came with a message. 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.

Anthropic had been on a historic growth trajectory. The U.S. 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. But in the weeks since the export order took effect, at least two companies—one in Tokyo, one in Beijing—have stepped into the space it left behind. Even if U.S. companies could win back trust should this 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.