Sakana AI and 360 Ship Rival Models as Anthropic Export Ban Bites

Two weeks after the Trump Administration banned Anthropic from exporting its Mythos and Fable 5 models to non-Americans, Asian AI startups are shipping competing products that explicitly target that gap. Sakana AI in Tokyo launched Fugu, an orchestration model that claims to stand "shoulder-to-shoulder" with Fable 5 and Mythos Preview. The company's website advertises "delivering frontier capability without the risk of export controls."

360, the Chinese cybersecurity firm, unveiled Tulongfeng, an AI tool for automatically discovering software vulnerabilities, and Yitianzhen for automated cyber defense and incident response. Founder Zhou Hongyi labeled vulnerability-finding AI a "national strategic asset" and warned of "one-way transparency" - a situation where some actors possess advanced detection capabilities while others do not.

Fugu isn't a clone, it's a hedge

Sakana's co-founder David Ha described Fugu as an Orchestration Model - one designed to coordinate agent usage across many other models via APIs, rather than being a single monolithic frontier model. "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.

Sakana's spokesperson told TechCrunch the timing was "entirely coincidental," but the G7 summit in Evian last week had AI access and export controls as a central topic. Co-founder Ren Ito published an op-ed urging the U.S. to "preserve access for its closest allies" and argued AI "should not become a technology that is hoarded."

The numbers behind the pivot

Anthropic's run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion in May 2026. How much of that comes from Asian enterprise customers is unknown, but within weeks of the export order, two companies - one in Tokyo, one in Beijing - stepped into the space it left behind. Even if the ban ends and U.S. companies win back trust, local alternatives trained on local language and nuance are already filling the gap.

David Ha's punchline: "Collective intelligence is the practical hedge against this concentration of power." That's not just marketing - it's a strategy that makes export controls harder to enforce when the underlying capability is distributed across many models, jurisdictions, and providers.

Source: Asian AI startups launch Mythos-like models
Domain: techcrunch.com