On Wednesday, Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 Allegedly Unveiled Tulongfeng, an AI tool it says can go head-to-head with Anthropic’s Mythos. It is the cyber security-focused AI model that is allegedly so powerful, the Trump administration has currently banned it and its more limited versionslegend 5, by the hands of non-Americans.

Earlier this week Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based AI startup Started Fugu.a model named after the Japanese word for blowfish. The company says this frontier AI model “stands shoulder-to-shoulder with leading models like Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos Preview.” It is also designed for agents, with the ability to orchestrate access to other models though their APIs.

Two new products of the Asian model came out after the ban by the US government. This is order that prevents anthropic. Mythos and Fable took place two weeks before global access.

A spokesperson for Sakana AI told TechCrunch that the release of its new model was “completely coincidental,” yet that didn’t stop it from seizing the moment. Its website advertises “providing cross-border capacity without the risk of export controls”.

“Sakana Fogo is something we’ve been building for the past year – the research behind it was presented at ICLR this spring, and it reflects the vision of how we deliver frontier-level value in Sakana AI. We believed in the product on its own merits; the timing just happened to bring it more attention than we expected.”

Sakana, founded in 2023 by former Google researchers Ren Ito, Leon Jones and David Ha, builds affordable generative AI models that work well with small datasets and are suited to the Japanese language and culture.

While the company is targeting Fogo at Japanese businesses and government agencies looking to reduce their exposure to tightening export controls, it is not yet announcing a move away from American AI in Asia.

“American models are important for Asia,” the spokesman said, a view echoed by co-founder Ren Ito’s remarks. G7 summit in Evian Last week, where access to AI and export controls were one of the main topics. “We’ll characterize the current moment in those terms rather than permanently revisiting one set of players.”

Sakana co-founder Ren Eto explained the approach in an op-ed published in Project Syndicate last week. He urged the US federal government to consider “The first priority should be to protect access.” to close US allies, and argued that “AI should not become a technology that is hoarded. It should be developed together.”

Sakana co-founder and CEO David Ha described Fogo as simply a land grab during a weak moment for American competitors. It is designed to coordinate agent usage between many models.

“Orchestration models are the next frontier, beyond big models,” He wrote on X. He argued that reliance on a single supplier for national infrastructure is a threat that recent export controls have made impossible to ignore.

“Access to Top Models can disappear overnight,” he wrote. “Collective intelligence is a practical hedge against this concentration of power.”

While Tokyo-based Sakana positioned Fogo as a hedge strategy, a way to preserve access to frontier AI, not replace it, China’s 360 was not hedging.

Chinese firm Allegedly Unveiled two AI security tools. Tulongfeng is designed to automatically discover software vulnerabilities, and Yitianzhen is designed to automate cyber defense and incident response.

However, the product launch came with a message. According to Reuters, 360 founder Zhao Hongyi described threat-detection AI as a national strategic asset, citing the risk of “one-sided transparency,” a situation in which some actors can access advanced vulnerability detection capabilities while others cannot.

Anthropic was on a historic growth trajectory. USAIL Labs said its run rate revenue exceeded $47 billion in May 2026. How much of this depends on Asian enterprise customers is not publicly known.

But in the weeks since the export order went into effect, at least two companies, one in Tokyo, one in Beijing, have stepped into the space it left behind. Even if American companies can regain confidence when the ban ends, local alternatives, trained to better understand the local language and importance, are already filling the gap.

360 did not respond to a request for comment.