On Wednesday, Chinese cybersecurity company 360 would have has unveiled Tulongfeng, an AI tool that it claims can take on the myth of Anthropic. It’s the cybersecurity-focused AI model that would be so powerful, according to the Trump administration. currently banned it and its more restricted versionFable 5, from the hands of non-Americans.
Earlier the same week, Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based AI startup said Fugua model named after the Japanese word for pufferfish. The company says this frontier AI model “stands alongside leading models like Fable 5 and Anthropic’s Mythos Preview.” It’s also designed for agents, with the ability to orchestrate access to other models through their APIs.
The two new Asian model products come as the US government’s ban continues. It is order which prevents the anthropic of worldwide access to Mythos and Fable happened two weeks ago.
A Sakana AI spokesperson told TechCrunch that the release of its new model was “entirely coincidental,” but that didn’t stop it from capitalizing on the moment. Its website announces “offering border capacities without the risk of export controls”.
“Sakana Fugu is something we’ve been building for the last year – the research behind it was presented at ICLR this spring, and it reflects an approach that is central to how we deliver industry-leading value at Sakana AI. We were confident in the product on its own merits; the timing just happened to get it more attention than expected,” the spokesperson said of launching during the export ban. Mythos/Fable.
Sakana, co-founded in 2023 by former Google researchers Ren Ito, Llion Jones, and David Ha, creates affordable generative AI models that work well with small datasets and are optimized for Japanese language and culture.
Although the company is targeting Fugu at Japanese companies and government agencies looking to reduce their exposure to tightened export controls, it is not yet proclaiming a lasting move away from U.S. AI in Asia.
“American models remain important for Asia,” the spokesperson said, a view consistent with co-founder Ren Ito’s remarks at the press conference. the G7 summit in Evian last week, where access to AI and export controls were one of the central topics. “We would characterize the current moment in these terms rather than as a permanent realignment towards any particular group of actors.”
Co-founder of Sakana It’s Ren expanded on this view in an op-ed published in Project Syndicate last week. He urged the US federal government, which considers that its “the first priority should be to preserve access,” for America’s closest allies, and argued that “AI should not become a hoarded technology; it should be a project that will develop together.
David Ha, co-founder and CEO of Sakana, described Fugu as more than just a land grab at a vulnerable time for a U.S. competitor. It is designed to coordinate agent usage across many models.
“Orchestration models are the next frontier beyond larger models” he wrote about X. Relying on a single supplier for national infrastructure, he argued, is a risk that recent export controls have made impossible to ignore.
“Access to top models can disappear overnight,” he writes. “Collective intelligence provides a practical protection against this concentration of power. »
While Tokyo-based Sakana presented Fugu as a hedging strategy, a way to preserve access to cutting-edge AI, not replace it, China’s 360 was not hedging.
The Chinese firm would have has unveiled two AI security tools. Tulongfeng is designed to automatically discover software vulnerabilities, and Yitianzhen is designed to automate cyber defense and incident response.
The product launch, however, came with a message. According to Reuters, 360 founder Zhou Hongyi described vulnerability-scanning 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 was on a historic growth trajectory. The US AI Lab said its current turnover exceeded 47 billion dollars in May 2026. To what extent this depends on Asian corporate customers is not publicly known.
But in the weeks since the export order took effect, at least two companies, one in Tokyo and the other in Beijing, have taken over. Even if U.S. businesses could regain trust if this ban were to ever end, local alternatives, trained to better understand local language and nuances, are already filling the void.
360 did not respond to a request for comment.
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Kate Park is a reporter at TechCrunch, covering technology, startups and venture capital in Asia. She was previously a financial journalist at Mergermarket, covering mergers and acquisitions, private equity and venture capital.
