Anthropic export ban spurs Asian AI rivals: Sakana and 360 Security launch alternatives

Two Asian AI companies launched products this week that position themselves as alternatives to Anthropic's suspended Mythos and Fable 5 models. Tokyo-based Sakana AI released Fugu, an orchestration model it says matches Fable 5 on key benchmarks, while Beijing cybersecurity firm 360 Security unveiled Tulongfeng, a vulnerability-discovery tool it claims can rival Mythos. Both launches arrived as the US government's export ban on Anthropic's most capable models entered its third week with no resolution in sight.

Sakana's approach is unusual. Rather than training a new frontier model from scratch, it built a seven-billion-parameter orchestrator whose job is to decide which external model should handle each part of a problem. Fugu routes tasks across a pool of available models, assembling and coordinating them as a team, and the company says the result matches the performance of systems that cost orders of magnitude more to train.

Fugu and Tulongfeng: Two very different strategies

Sakana was founded in 2023 by Llion Jones, a co-author of the original Transformer paper at Google, David Ha, a former Google Brain researcher, and Ren Ito, a former Japanese diplomat. The company raised $135 million in a Series B round in November 2025 at a valuation of nearly $3 billion. Its website advertises "delivering frontier capability without the risk of export controls."

• Sakana's Fugu orchestrates multiple models to match Fable 5 benchmarks without training a frontier model.
• 360 Security's Tulongfeng targets automated vulnerability discovery; a second tool, Yitianzhen, automates cyber defense and incident response.
• 360 Security founder Zhou Hongyi described vulnerability-finding AI as a national strategic asset and warned of "one-way transparency."
• Zhou conceded Chinese models lag US ones by 20 to 30 percent in base capability but argued waiting for parity was not an option.
• 360 Security says Tulongfeng has identified 3,432 software vulnerabilities, including 105 confirmed by Chinese authorities. Reuters could not independently verify those claims.

Implications for US AI dominance and Asian markets

The two launches reflect a dynamic that the Anthropic ban has accelerated across Asia. India is debating a $5 billion sovereign AI fund, and AI access was a central topic at the G7 summit in Evian last week, where Sakana's Ren Ito was among the business leaders invited to participate. Ito later wrote in an op-ed for Project Syndicate that the US government should prioritize preserving access for its closest allies, arguing that AI should be developed together, not hoarded.

Neither Sakana nor 360 is claiming to replace American frontier AI outright. Sakana frames Fugu as a hedge, a way to preserve capability even when access to a single provider disappears overnight. Ito told TechCrunch that "US models remain important to Asia" and characterized the current moment as something short of a permanent realignment. But the commercial reality is moving faster than the diplomacy. Anthropic's run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion in May, and how much of that depends on Asian enterprise customers is not publicly known. What is known is that two weeks of export restrictions have already produced two concrete competitors, one in an allied capital and one in a rival's, both marketing themselves on a promise Washington's ban made for them: that dependence on American AI carries a risk no amount of capability can offset.