Two Asian AI companies have launched models they claim rival Anthropic’s most powerful tools, and the timing is hard to ignore. The moves come as a U.S. government export ban continues to block Anthropic from selling its Mythos model and its more limited version, Fable 5, to customers outside the United States. The order took effect two weeks ago.
According to TechCrunch, Tokyo-based Sakana AI launched a model called Fugu, named after the Japanese word for blowfish. The same week, Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 reportedly unveiled Tulongfeng, an AI tool it says can go head-to-head with Anthropic’s Mythos. These are not small players filling a niche. These are companies positioning themselves as real alternatives to one of the most closely watched AI labs in the world.
Anthropic had been on a steep growth curve. The company reported a run-rate revenue of $47 billion in May 2026. How much of that came from Asian enterprise customers is not public, but the export ban cut off access for all of them overnight, and local competitors did not wait long to respond.
Sakana AI says Fugu “stands shoulder-to-shoulder with leading models like Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos Preview.” The company is co-founded by former Google researchers Ren Ito, Llion Jones, and David Ha, and has been focused on building affordable AI models optimized for the Japanese language and culture since 2023. Fugu is also built for agent use, meaning it can coordinate access to other models through their APIs. CEO David Ha described this capability as the real point of the launch.
“Orchestration Models are the next frontier, beyond bigger models,” Ha wrote on X. He argued that depending on a single provider for national AI 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.”
Sakana said the launch timing was “entirely coincidental,” but the company has not been shy about the moment. Its website advertises “delivering frontier capability without the risk of export controls.” A spokesperson told TechCrunch that Fugu has been in development since last year, with underlying research presented at the ICLR conference this spring.
Still, Sakana is not declaring the end of U.S. AI dominance in Asia. “U.S. models remain important to Asia,” the spokesperson said. Co-founder Ren Ito made a similar point at the G7 summit in Evian last week, where AI access and export controls were a central topic. In an op-ed published by Project Syndicate, Ito urged the U.S. government to make preserving access for its closest allies a first priority, and argued that AI “should not become a technology that is hoarded; it should be one that is developed together.”
China’s 360 took a sharper tone. The firm reportedly launched two tools:
- Tulongfeng, designed to automatically discover software vulnerabilities
- Yitianzhen, built to automate cyber defense and incident response
360 founder Zhou Hongyi described vulnerability-finding AI as a national strategic asset, and warned about what he called “one-way transparency,” where some actors can access advanced vulnerability-detection tools while others cannot. That framing positions the launch less as a product announcement and more as a geopolitical statement. 360 did not respond to a request for comment.
The broader picture here is significant. Export controls were meant to limit the spread of powerful AI tools. But in practice, they have also created a clear commercial opening for local alternatives. Companies in Japan and China are now training models that understand local language and cultural context better than U.S. models do, and they are filling the gap while Anthropic is locked out. Even if the ban ends and Anthropic wins back access to Asian markets, those alternatives will still exist, and some customers who switched may not come back.
The ban is only two weeks old. The fact that two serious competitors have already launched credible responses says something about how fast this space moves, and how much leverage the U.S. actually has when it tries to restrict it.
