On Wednesday, Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 reportedly unveiled Tulongfeng, an AI tool it says can go head-to-head with Anthropic’s Mythos. That’s the cybersecurity-focused AI model that is reportedly so powerful, the Trump Administration has currently banned it and its more restricted version, Fable 5, from the hands of non-Americans.

Earlier the same week Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based AI startup launched 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 an ability to orchestrate access to other models though their APIs.

The two new Asian model products come as the U.S. government’s ban drags on. It’s order that prevents Anthropic from global access to Mythos and Fable occurred two weeks ago.

A spokesperson at Sakana AI told TechCrunch that release of its new model was “entirely coincidental,” yet that hasn’t stopped it from capitalizing on the moment. It’s website advertises “delivering 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 about launching during the Mythos/Fable export ban.

Sakana, co-founded in 2023 by former Google researchers Ren Ito,  Llion Jones and David Ha, makes affordable generative AI models that work well with small datasets and are optimized for the Japanese language and culture.

While the company is targeting Fugu at Japanese businesses and government agencies looking to reduce their exposure to tightening export controls, it isn’t yet proclaiming a lasting shift away from U.S. AI in Asia.

“U.S. models remain important to Asia,” the spokesperson said, a view consistent with remarks co-founder Ren Ito made at the G7 summit in Evian last week, where AI access and export controls were one of the 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 elaborated on that view in an op-ed published in the Project Syndicate last week. He urged the US federal government, that consider that its “first priority should be to preserve access,” for America’s closest allies, and 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 a 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, not replace it, China’s 360 wasn’t 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, and 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, 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.

Two weeks into the ban that caused Anthropic to pull its powerful cybersecurity-oriented models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, from the market, the Trump administration is softening its stance.

It is now allowing Anthropic to make Mythos 5 available to more than 100 specific U.S. government agencies and companies, including allowing the non-American employees at those organizations to access to the model, both Semafor and Reuters report. This list also includes Anthropic’s own non-American employees, who were included in the original ban that forbade non-Americans from accessing the models.

“I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Anthropic’s chief compute officer Tom Brown on Friday, according to the missive seen by Semafor.

Apparently, the administration did not address the release of Fable 5 in this directive. This is a version of Mythos 5 that was widely released a couple of days before the ban because it was said to have more protections. Both models were pulled after those guardrails were allegedly bypassed easily by security researchers. Anthropic did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

Elon Musk is eyeing an acquisition of Mesh Optical Technologies, a startup founded by three former SpaceX engineers last year developing hardware for fast data center communications.

The potential acquisition, which was revealed in a Federal Trade Commission filing and first reported by Bloomberg, confirmed the agency expedited its antitrust review.

Mesh Optical came out of stealth in February when it announced that it raised a $50 million Series A led by Thrive Capital.

Before founding Mesh Optical, the startup’s co-founders, Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos, and Serena Grown-Haeberli, developed the optical communication links that keep thousands of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites interconnected.

The Mesh co-founders saw an opportunity to develop optical transceivers for terrestrial data centers, as light-based hardware is faster and more energy-efficient than traditional electrical-based systems.

SpaceX has recently entered into agreements with Anthropic, Google, and the open-source AI developer Reflection AI to provide them with compute capacity at its data centers, generating a substantial new revenue stream for the newly public company. Acquiring Mesh could eventually allow SpaceX to improve the efficiency of its data centers, whether they are located on Earth or, in the future, in space.