On Wednesday, Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 announced Tulongfeng, an artificial intelligence tool designed to compete directly with Anthropic‘s Mythos. US authorities have currently blocked the distribution of that model and its restricted variant, Fable 5, to anyone outside the United States.
Sakana AI, a company based in Tokyo, released Fugu earlier that same week. The model takes its name from the Japanese word for blowfish. Sakana states that this system matches the performance of leading global models like Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos Preview. The software is built for agents and can manage access to other models through their application programming interfaces.
These two new products from Asia arrive as the US government’s restrictions continue. The order preventing Anthropic from selling Mythos and Fable globally was issued two weeks ago.
A spokesperson for Sakana AI told TechCrunch that the release of the new model was entirely coincidental. The company has nonetheless capitalised on the situation. Its website now advertises the ability to deliver 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,” the spokesperson said regarding the launch during the export ban.
Sakana, co-founded in 2023 by former Google researchers Ren Ito, Llion Jones and David Ha, produces affordable generative AI models. These systems work effectively with small datasets and are optimised for the Japanese language and culture.
While the company targets Fugu at Japanese businesses and government agencies looking to reduce exposure to tightening export controls, it is not yet proclaiming a lasting shift away from US AI in Asia.
“U.S. models remain important to Asia,” the spokesperson said. This view matches 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 view in an op-ed published in the Project Syndicate last week. He urged the US federal government to consider that its “first priority should be to preserve access” for America’s closest allies. He argued 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 US competitors. It is designed to coordinate agent usage among 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 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.”
While Tokyo-based Sakana positioned Fugu as a hedge strategy, a way 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.
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. He 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 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.
But 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 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.
What it means
Developers in Asia now have specific options when US tools become inaccessible. They can adopt systems like Fugu to manage multiple models locally or switch to domestic security tools like Tulongfeng. These alternatives are trained on local languages and cultural contexts, which often matters more than raw model size for regional businesses.
