The Trump administration’s export ban on Anthropic’s most advanced models is creating exactly the kind of market vacuum that critics warned about. Two weeks after Mythos 5 and Fable 5 were blocked from non-American access, Asian AI startups are rushing to fill the gap with alternatives of their own.
Sakana AI: Fugu, the orchestration hedge.
Tokyo-based Sakana AI launched Fugu, a multi-agent orchestration model that the company says “stands shoulder-to-shoulder with leading models like Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos Preview.” Rather than being a single monolithic model, Fugu orchestrates access to other models via their APIs, a design choice that CEO David Ha framed as a strategic hedge.
“Access to top models can disappear overnight,” Ha wrote on X. “Collective intelligence is the practical hedge against this concentration of power.”
Sakana co-founder Ren Ito, who spoke at the G7 summit in Evian on AI access and export controls, wrote in a Project Syndicate op-ed: “First priority should be to preserve access. AI should not become a technology that is hoarded; it should be one that is developed together.”
The company’s website is blunt about its positioning: “Delivering frontier capability without the risk of export controls.”
Sakana was founded in 2023 by former Google researchers Ren Ito, Llion Jones, and David Ha, and raised a $135 million Series B at a $2.65 billion valuation in November 2025. The company makes generative AI models optimized for Japanese language and culture, training on smaller datasets than frontier US models.
A spokesperson insisted the timing was coincidental: “Sakana Fugu is something we have been building since last year, the research behind it was presented at ICLR this spring. The timing simply happened to coincide with a moment that brought it more attention than we expected.”
360: Tulongfeng and Yitianzhen.
Beijing-based cybersecurity giant 360 took a more confrontational approach. Founder Zhou Hongyi unveiled two models: Tulongfeng, an AI tool designed to automatically discover software vulnerabilities that the company claims matches Mythos in cybersecurity capability, and Yitianzhen, an automated cyber defense and incident response tool.
Zhou framed vulnerability-finding AI as a national strategic asset, warning of “one-way transparency,” where some nations can access advanced vulnerability detection while others cannot. The language explicitly mirrors the Trump administration’s own national security framing for the export ban.
The broader implication.
The two launches are philosophically different, Sakana positions Fugu as a practical hedge for businesses and governments seeking to reduce single-provider risk, while 360 frames its tools as a national security necessity. But the result is the same: the gap left by Anthropic’s absence is being filled by local alternatives that understand local language, culture, and regulatory environments.
Even if the US export ban is eventually lifted, trust may be hard to rebuild. Asian customers who have invested in Fugu or 360’s tools may not rush back to US providers. The administration’s two-week experiment in export control may have permanently reshaped the competitive landscape of AI, and not in America’s favor.
Sources: Asian AI startups launch Mythos-like models as Anthropic’s export ban drags on (TechCrunch, June 2026)