Two weeks is a long time in AI. That’s how long it’s been since the White House barred Anthropic from making Mythos and Fable 5 available outside the US. And in exactly those two weeks, the predictable thing happened: others moved into the gap.
Tokyo and Beijing make their move
Sakana AI in Tokyo went first. The startup unveiled a model called Fugu — named after the Japanese pufferfish. Sakana says Fugu stands ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ with Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos Preview. The pitch on its website is blunt: ‘frontier capability without the risk of export controls.’
Days later, Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 weighed in with not one but two AI tools. Tulongfeng is built to automatically discover software vulnerabilities; Yitianzhen is built to automate cyber defense. According to reports, 360 positions Tulongfeng explicitly as a counterpart to Mythos — the exact model the US government pulled from circulation over its cyber capabilities.
‘Coincidental’ — but convenient all the same
Sakana insists the launch was ‘entirely coincidental’: Fugu has been in the works since last year, and the research behind it was presented at ICLR this spring. That didn’t stop the company from enjoying the spotlight. Sakana was founded in 2023 by ex-Google researchers Ren Ito, Llion Jones, and David Ha, and raised $135 million last November at a $2.65 billion valuation.
Co-founder Ren Ito has been clear about where he stands. Washington’s first priority, he argued in an op-ed, should be to preserve access for America’s closest allies. AI shouldn’t become a technology that gets hoarded — it should be developed together. At the G7 summit in Evian, that was one of the central topics on the table.
My take
This is the uncomfortable flip side of export controls. They protect you in the short term, but they create a market for exactly the alternatives you were trying to prevent. Anthropic reported a $47 billion run-rate in May. How much of that rides on Asian enterprise customers isn’t public — but every customer who switches to Fugu or a local model now won’t come back quickly.
And that’s the real point. Local models often understand language and context better, they answer to no foreign export authority, and they’re available precisely when US access can vanish overnight. Even if the ban lifts someday, the trust being lost right now can’t be restored by decree.
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