When the U.S. government forced Anthropic to cut off foreign access to its top AI models, it created a vacuum — and competitors in Asia are rushing to fill it. New systems from Japan and China are being marketed, in TechCrunch's words, as offering "Mythos-like capabilities without fear of an export ban," TechCrunch reported.

The opening

Earlier this month, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to suspend non-U.S. access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its two most capable models, citing a national-security concern. (An export control is a government rule restricting the sale or transfer of sensitive technology abroad.) Anthropic complied, pulling the models for all foreign users — a move that, by Al Jazeera's account, left roughly 200 institutions across 15 countries, allies included, suddenly cut off from what many considered the leading AI system in the world. Boursel has covered the ban and the diplomatic strain it caused.

Who's stepping in

Sakana AI, a Tokyo startup founded in 2023 by former Google researchers, launched a model called Fugu on June 22, saying it stands "shoulder-to-shoulder" with Fable 5 and Mythos. Rather than one giant network, Fugu is an orchestration model — it routes each request across a pool of existing frontier models (the leading-edge systems) and picks the best tool for the job. Sakana says its top tier beats Anthropic's and OpenAI's flagships on a software-engineering benchmark — but those scores are the company's own, not independently verified, a caveat worth stressing. Sakana raised $135 million last November at a $2.65 billion valuation.

The marketing is pointed. Sakana pitches "frontier capability without the risk of export controls," and co-founder David Ha framed the logic broadly: "Access to top models can disappear overnight."

In China, the cybersecurity firm 360 Security Technology unveiled two systems at a Beijing conference, one of which its founder Zhou Hongyi called "the Chinese version of Mythos" — a tool to automatically hunt software vulnerabilities. Zhou claimed it had found thousands of flaws, though Reuters reported it could not independently verify the figures, and he acknowledged Chinese models still trail their U.S. peers by an estimated 20–30%.

Why the ban happened

The restriction traced to a specific jailbreak — a trick for bypassing an AI's safety guardrails — that the government said it found in Fable 5, raising concern that Mythos's powerful code-analysis abilities could be misused. Anthropic called the issue narrow and argued that, applied across the industry, the same standard "would essentially halt all new model deployments." On June 26, the U.S. allowed Anthropic to restore limited access for select customers, easing — but not ending — the freeze, CNN reported.

The strategic question

The episode is a live experiment in whether export controls work as intended. The U.S. case is that denying rivals access to the best models slows them down. The counter-argument, which the past two weeks illustrate, is that cutting off even allied markets signals that U.S. AI supply is unreliable — pushing customers toward local or alternative providers and handing rivals a marketing gift. China's 360 turned the policy into a sales pitch within days; European officials, wary of being "unplugged overnight," have cited it as a reason to build their own capacity, a tailwind for firms like France's Mistral.

The business stakes

For Anthropic, the timing stings. The company is widely reported to be preparing a blockbuster IPO at a valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars, per Fortune, and yanking its two flagship models offline — even temporarily — injects uncertainty just as it courts public investors.

For the challengers, the window may be narrow. Sakana's Fugu depends on the very frontier models it routes between, so if Anthropic's models return globally, some of its urgency fades. China's tool is a more direct substitute but, by its maker's own admission, not yet at parity. The broader point stands regardless: in AI, capability and access are now instruments of statecraft — and every restriction creates an opening for someone else to sell into.