Asian AI startups launch Mythos-like models

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/27/asian-ai-startups-launch-mythos-like-models-as-anthropics-export-ban-drags-on/

by bogdiyan • 25 days ago

283 197 25 days ago

techcrunch.com

qsxfthnkp2322• 25 days ago

So now as a regular American we are behind because gatekeepers saying super intelligence is too scary

It was bound to happen soon.

microgpt• 25 days ago

People who are shielded by walls are always surprised when the same walls shield the people outside from them

lagrange772• 25 days ago

It is scary.

w4yai3• 25 days ago

It is not. Where's the danger ? We will need to adapt, as in every technology progress, but what do you think will happen ? Realistically ? Don't feed the fearmongering. Yes, we're disrupting the status quo, if that's the danger, then welcome to the world.

cultofmetatron2• 25 days ago

SOTA AI is the only place where we are ahead. china has us beat on manufacturing, logistics and workhorse grade models like deepseek pro and glm5.2.

we're increasingly irrelevant

verdverm• 25 days ago

they are also generating >2x the amount of electricity, core to ai, robots, and manufacturing

yggy3• 25 days ago

Brand too.

American firms are toxic - there’s an implicit gamble they are all making.

blurbleblurble• 25 days ago

intelligence has always been a threat to the idiocracy

prng20212• 25 days ago

[flagged]

amarcheschi• 25 days ago

Anthropic just stole the internet and put it in a transformer and pat itself on the back for it - well no to be honest we have to suffer through hearing them saying that this model is really really dangerous until they got a reaction for they fear mongering

itsdesmond• 25 days ago

[flagged]

I_am_tiberius• 25 days ago

renoir• 25 days ago

This exactly.

YC companies literally steal competing company 1:1 and you turn blindeye.

Then a thief steals from a thief to give it out at better prices than you write low quality comment.

Shame that America will greet 250th anniversary with this kind living in it.

prng20212• 25 days ago

Thanks for the irrelevant comment. I’m criticizing these Chinese companies because these aren’t accomplishments. Where did I praise Anthropic?

dang3• 25 days ago

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ceejayoz3• 25 days ago

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-...

Seems like a bit of karmic justice.

visha1v2• 25 days ago

they mined the internet first. now they’re upset someone brought a shovel.

TheGoddessInari• 25 days ago

Both of the mentioned models are model orchestrators using a vastly different multi model paradigm.

Saying they in particularare distilled from Anthropic is really [citation needed].

nullbio2• 25 days ago

[flagged]

ceejayoz3• 25 days ago

Now no one can access ChatGPT 5.6 because of their 5 year long fearmongering regulatory capture campaign.

I'm sympathetic to this arguement, but it's silly to ignore the other half; that the administration has openly feuding with them for months over limits to military capabilities.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/04/hegseth-anthropic-d...

dang3• 25 days ago

Can you please make your substantive points more thoughtfully? You've been breaking the site guidelines with posts like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: also, while I don't doubt that you are sincere, this is excessive: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Alifatisk2• 25 days ago

I seriously do not comprehend how a consumer like you can have sympathy for Anthropic, as if you are part of their organisation or something. Competition is good for us. Wouldn't it have been for asian labs, we would would be fully dependent on OpenAI, Anthropic and Googles services.

dang3• 25 days ago

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

The idea here is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

kingforaday• 25 days ago

They have an impressive set of investors [1]. Also, HN Headline [2] from the other day with 100+ comments.

1. https://sakana.ai/company-info/?lang=en

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48624782

UncleOxidant• 25 days ago

Has either of these companies released models before this? It's hard to believe that they could release a supposed Mythos-level model just out-of-the-blue. Deepseek, Z.ai, Alibaba/Qwen have been at this for a lot longer and have been releasing models with steadily increasing capabilities for about 18 months now. I find it hard to believe that these new companies would just suddenly release a Mythos-level model without releasing anything prior.

pogue• 25 days ago

How do we define "mythos level" exactly outside of marketing buzz? I don't even think the majority of us can access Mythos yet even to make a comparison.

khurs10• 25 days ago

https://sakana.ai/company-info/?lang=en

1 x Co-author of the landmark "Attention Is All You Need" paper

1 x google researcher

20+ big name investors funding

Founded July 2023 so been working on it a few years, it may fall short but they have the money and talent to be potentially decent.

Spooky23• 25 days ago

Mythos is extreme hype. We are at a combo of authoritarian politicians peddling fear for power and tech bros trying to extract maximum investment returns.

We’re going to have many LLM/toolset combos that do what mythos does.

tpjklpfasdoiuo• 25 days ago

They also had a fairly humiliating retraction last year,

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/21/sakana-walks-back-claims-t...

visha1v2• 25 days ago

asian is bad wording. this is a japanese startup backed by khosla ventures. japan is an ally of west. the title makes it sound like a chinese company did this.

mksreddy• 25 days ago

The article talks about 1 Chinese and 1 Japanese model.

khurs10• 25 days ago

Should have said East Asia.

As I clicked expecting India from the title (as China are already there and India has so many devs surprising they haven't yet).

colordrops• 25 days ago

Is that really the most sailent facet of this story? Boxing it by official friend vs foe designations? Don't american academic institutions and corporate entities cooperate closely with Chinese companies as well?

WarmWash• 25 days ago

The US and China are in a cold war right now, whether that is fully recognized or not, the fight has already begun. The US is blocking models from getting out of the country and China is blocking researchers from getting out of the country. The expectation should be only more closing off in the future.

threethirtytwo2• 25 days ago

Patriotism makes people biased. Better to not hold an identity in this area.

exidex• 25 days ago

People are biased by definition

vcryan• 25 days ago

We are all people. This ally-of-the-west framing is propaganda. Who has harmed me more: this US or China? Who do I have more in common with: a tech worker in China or a US government official?

(I'm based in US - I use the best tech for the task).

JumpinJack_Cash• 25 days ago

WHen push came to shove Trump backed down on Jan 6th / the institutions held their ground.

On the other hand Xi is President for Life and absolute autocrat of China.

This answers your question in a pretty compelling way.

lelanthran3• 25 days ago

Feels like I need to repeat myself more than once a day now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48697258

These companies providing tokens, whether SOTA or not, that want to IPO are so fucked as time goes on.
Can't sell their SOTA models, only slightly better than the open source models for the models they can sell, cost 20x to 50x for good models, a TAM that consists almost solely of developers, with no customer of theirs actually boasting increased profits as a result of AI...
I fear their time to IPO may have passed.

What on earth could Anthropic and OpenAI Pivot to now?

outside1234• 25 days ago

Propaganda? Pay for “facts” to be placed in the model?

fassssst• 25 days ago

a TAM that consists almost solely of developers

That’s the wrong assumption. These models are good at office docs too.

airstrike• 25 days ago

They're passable at those. And still no moat.

dgellow• 25 days ago

But you can do office docs work with way cheaper models

AndrewKemendo3• 25 days ago

I have yet to see a model that can make a consistent and repeatable powerpoint deck that doesn’t need considerable manual revision

Find me someone who is putting raw text in and getting out a usable weekly staff meeting deck that doesn’t require massive revisions

lelanthran3• 25 days ago

That’s the wrong assumption. These models are good at office docs too.

The cheap models handle that very well. The SOTA models still only have target TAM of developers only.

You only need SOTA for development. The $1t investment is in SOTA companies.

clusterhacks2• 25 days ago

I used to agree with you but now do not. I now think the floor for this market is probably no worse than the annual revenue of cell phone plans in the US market. So say, $250 billion.

Now, that probably doesn't justify the valuations and hype being thrown around, but I think it gets at a real revenue number.

I also don't know how that number fits into the funding rounds already raised and VC dreams of IPOs for these two.

This isn't coming from deep analysis on a verifiable source, but I started asking people in my social circle (includes white-collar and blue-collar folks) about their LLM use. The biggest surprise in 2026 for me was that almost all of these people told me about regular (and sometimes sophisticated) use.

A more intriguing observation - I work on the side with high school students and have two college kids of my own. Their LLM usage (and their peers) is much, much lower than expected . . . that's a little counterintuitive given "popular" perceptions I read.

lelanthran3• 25 days ago

I used to agree with you but now do not. I now think the floor for this market is probably no worse than the annual revenue of cell phone plans in the US market. So say, $250 billion.

I don't think we're talking about the same thing. I'm talking about what their IPO is going to do to their share price.

In any case, $250b revenue translates to, best case scenario, $50b profit. On an investment of $1t. It does not look good for those companies making up the $1t investment.

throw310822• 25 days ago

Interesting idea and reasonable number, but cell phones need a lot of infrastructure and they need interconnection. The risk here is that in the future a combination of near-sota open weights models optimised to use as little resources as possible and a reasonable drop in compute price, will make possible for small and tiny providers to compete with Anthropic/ OpenAI or even for people to run their own private models for most applications. Then large, expensive sota models would only be used for research and to answer the small subset of general user queries that need that kind of intelligence.

a34729t• 25 days ago

The open models are half the equation. The other half is Apple's hardware, which is likely to see major memory bandwidth improvements over the next 2-3 generations and will be capable of running substantial models locally. By that point the open models will be beyond today's SOTA.

khurs10• 25 days ago

I fear their time to IPO may have passed.

They may not get the valuation they want, but as it appears to be on a plateau may be better to offload now?

As per SpaceX, so many big names are involved the media will be controlled to hype it up and the investment banks will forecast 100x revenue in 2 years...

neumann• 25 days ago

I agree with everything you said about their situation, but it's not like that is what will be evaluated in an IPO. There will be continued hype by the companies, lobbying to win support of a corrupt administration, and a narrative spin by clueless media about this AI revolution that will give investors fomo.

fwipsy3• 25 days ago

First impression: Third-party benchmarks or gtfo. Personally, I've never heard of either of these companies before. We're just supposed to take their word that they've matched the best models on the market?

Sakana describes their model as a "Orchestration Model." Does that mean that it's actually a bunch of different models glued together?

OutOfHere2• 25 days ago

Did Anthropic give you third-party benchmarks? Is that what you said to them? Yes, they're important, but the attitude is wrong.

bloppe2• 25 days ago

Anthropic always publishes 3p benchmarks every time they announce a new model

fwipsy3• 25 days ago

Fudging benchmarks is a cheap way to get attention. If the model is really that good, it will have plenty of attention soon enough.

lifeformed• 25 days ago

Is it actually that hard to make good models or is it just about the amount of resources you have to do training? (This is an actual question, I really don't know.) I'm sure it's not trivial but does it really take world class secret knowledge to build off of the known existing techniques? I feel like there's tons of low hanging fruit still to explore, and time and resources are the limiting factor.

MostlyStable3• 25 days ago

The gap between grok and Gemini to Claude and chatgpt suggests that yes it is that hard.

fwipsy3• 25 days ago

Not hard to be a fast follower. Lots of companies are ~6-9 months behind. Reaching the actual bleeding edge is much harder.

khurs10• 25 days ago

Is it actually that hard to make good models

Didn't take DeepSeek long. Or XAI to launch grok.

If they have a top team and the money then appears to be a matter of a year or two? And one startup mentioned is Japanese not Chinese so they won't be banned from buying US tech.

Ifkaluva• 25 days ago

Their release post was on HN recently. The comments seemed to think that it was similar to OpenRouter, not an actual model.

alwa• 25 days ago

My impression is that the answer is yes, that it purports to dispense the glue on-the-fly in some kind of dynamic way rather than being some kind of new model-amalgam.

See also contemporaneous reaction at:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48624782 (6 days ago, 244 points, 133 comments)

tough• 25 days ago

Also sakana has misrepresented their findings previously i think to remember [1]

1.https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1iwbwgu/sakana...

w4yai3• 25 days ago

Excellent. I'm very thankful the asian/chinese don't give a fuck about the US government. It feels good to have a competitor.

jdw64• 25 days ago

Where can I get the API?

Alifatisk2• 25 days ago

Through their website.

zkmon• 25 days ago

I think it is time that we had a UN-sponsored standards body dedicated to bench-marking the newest models from around the world, for everyone's benefit.

ottotarc• 25 days ago

Given the national security implications, it's no surprise that Japan and China are rushing to build sovereign models post-ban. But when these startups claim parity with "Mythos," could it be that they are just optimizing for very specific inference tasks? I wonder if we are seeing the real battleground shift from raw training scale toward specialized inference.

skeledrew• 25 days ago

YES! Now things become even more interesting. US, your move.

khurs10• 25 days ago

Let's wait till some independent benchmarks appear.

But encouraging for Japan to announce competition along with China.

glimshe• 25 days ago

Without reliable benchmarks, they are Mythos-like only in the sense that they accept text as input and produce text as output.

theplumber• 25 days ago

Well if they are hyped like Mythos then we can add that to the list of “like Mythos”. Perhaps what’s missing is their CEO warning the world that their model is too unsafe to be released on the internet and someone must stop them before it’s too late.

irthomasthomas• 25 days ago

They provide benchmarks in the paper https:// arxiv.org/abs/2606.21228

khurs10• 25 days ago

Think 'indepenent' was implied when glimshe wrote 'reliable' benchmarks. Needs to be on the usual leaderboards.

chrsw2• 25 days ago

I don't even look at benchmarks anymore. I just try different models as they're released on our large, proprietary, systems software codebases in real, shipping products or projects that will ship eventually. It's pretty clear which models help me do my job better or faster. I'm fortunate enough to have the token budget to use basically as much as I need, for now.

No need for benchmarks, evals, marketing, system cards or anything like that. I read the web for tips, practices and release announcements. My colleagues and I share our experiences with each other but beyond that, everything else is just noise.

BlaDeKke• 25 days ago

This is the way. Not that big of budget here. But if there’s something promising, I just try that for a month or so. But even then… at this moment I’m using z.ai models and those do the job. No need for anything else. So I’m staying until there is something new, same affordability, but a lot better. (Using a coding plan)

buthowjejddjeu5• 25 days ago

I am not against AI but I do wonder how you guys handle the fact this leaks all your code and is stored forever on servers belonging to God knows who?

I “trust” OpenAI and Anthropic (somewhat) but to be honest I still feel only safe using it on code without any secret sauce whatsoever. Luckily that’s a lot of code, but still. I wonder how others are looking at this?

(FYI I feel the same about Github and we also don’t store our code there)

cdurth4• 25 days ago

I tried the Fugu models with some real world tales in C# and unity using mcp and open code. I exhausted the $20 plan 5 hour window in one prompt to review my theme system and plan some color changes. So I upgraded to the $100 to see the implementation and result. Well the result was worse than Opus, incredibly slow, and I ended up exhausting the new 5 hour window and have used 35% of the weekly now and it hardly created something opus was able to do at a fraction of the time and cost.

Do what you wish with this info, but it seems to be a complete waste of $$.

OsrsNeedsf2P• 25 days ago

We provide a similar service for Godot instead of Unity, and 20$ plan being exhausted in one prompt on a top model like Opus sounds about right. That's the life when you pay API prices and can't afford 10x subsidies.

rtpg• 25 days ago

Is this true even for more targeted prompts that aren't about looking over an entire codebase or w/e? I just stick to my sub pricing and find good success on targeted requests, but I wonder if I would run up against things even then if not for subsidies.

cdurth4• 24 days ago

Not sure if you meant Fable/Mythos instead of Opus, but I can comfortable work several hours a day using Opus on Max-Ultracode on the CC 10x.

zzleeper• 25 days ago

I tested Fable through Cursor; asked for ideas on how to make a data website I have less "Claude-like" (IYKYK what are the usual tells), and it spun out the most useless, Claude-like CSS styling ever, wasting $40 in 10 minutes.

The website was created through Opus, so you could also say the results were worse than Opus. (This is just to say that I had the same experience using the US models, so perhaps those Asian models are Mythos-like lol)

nonethewiser• 25 days ago

If you actually give it an example of the style it can copy it well. even just screenshots of other websites or UIs. It just sucks at producing it itself.

addandsubtract2• 25 days ago

Why would the model know what "Claude-like" is?

cheema33• 25 days ago

I tested Fable through Cursor;

I tested Fable for a whole day. And my experience was quite the opposite. I was blown away. Admittedly, I did not try it through a middleman like Cursor. I used Claude Code CLI.

Bombthecat• 25 days ago

Same experience with web search / research, it was bad compared to opus.

Missed half the stuff the other half was outdated/ didn't verify.

hmokiguess• 25 days ago

I experienced the same exact thing, however, I will say that I had misconfigured it on `pi` at first.

I was using its chat endpoint not the responses with tool calling and everything, and I haven't tried it again since, learned that recently and I am planning on giving it another shot.

zobzu• 25 days ago

thata what i usually expect. its all as good as the top 3 u til you try em and then theyre.. just ok at best

pranaym• 25 days ago

This is useful info. For the couple of days that Fable was live - it was clearly a step above Opus 4.8 and I was able to get 8-10 prompts in using my $20 plan.

LarsDu88• 25 days ago

Which unity mcp do you use? I've been playing around with the official one, but was wondering what other folks use.

Ran into a package conflict issue with the popular coplay one

cdurth4• 24 days ago

I have been using the coplay MCP for Unity.

ezoe• 25 days ago

Because Fugu is not an independent model. They just use multiple existing SaaS models from OpenAI, Anthropic etc in background, gather response and generate results based on these response.

They claims that combining the results of multiple AI models and generate final result by using their in-house proprietary model improve the quality than using the single backend model.

It cause all sorts of doubts like: is their in-house model really exists? Is their in-house model really capable?

Personally, even if their claim is correct, such feature can be easily implemented in client side like Claude Code etc, using the equally capable model from background model to generate the final result.

I smell something fishy on their service.

GTP2• 24 days ago

I saw something similar on openRouter.

firefoxd2• 25 days ago

I'm expecting a ban of "foreign" llms due to "safety concerns" before the year is over.

It will have nothing to do with the actual performance. But anthropic has set the bar for mythos-like systems, and whatever meets that loosely defined bar will be unsafe for the public.

neom• 25 days ago

How would that work in practice?

firefoxd2• 25 days ago

All American services won't be allowed to provide the models. Huggingface for example. The same way BYDs are illegal in the US.

root_axis• 25 days ago

If you host it or are caught running it locally, then you go to jail.

Since it's a national security issue, they'll be inclined to enforce aggressively.

teliosix• 25 days ago

As if there is no actual risk as the models progress, give me a break.

I seem to live in an alternate reality that Claude is the only thing that seems to ever say anything smart at this point.

Almost everything I read from humans is a hallucination and performative bullshit.

realusername• 25 days ago

Well, goodbye to US tech and welcome China then I guess, nobody will wait and you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

devcatapult• 25 days ago

The "Mythos-like" talk is getting kinda annoying. Us normal people have no way to compare it outside of looking at benchmarks

atherton33• 25 days ago

"Mythos-like" just means "hyped via hearsay". It's being used correctly here.

resonious2• 25 days ago

It means scores well in common benchmarks.

siva72• 24 days ago

Asian ai startups have also no way to compare despite making bold claims, and one could argue the whole point of the trump intervention was to prohibit them from distilling faible.

an0malous3• 24 days ago

And there aren’t even any public benchmarks right?

GTP2• 25 days ago

My cinic take is, if the model is decent it would be hard to disprove their claim of it being Mythos-like, since now Mythos is unavailable.

ai_slop_hater• 25 days ago

What is Mythos like? Asking as someone who never had access to it.

p1esk• 25 days ago

It’s got to be similar to Fable, which I experienced for 3 days, and which impressed me (compared to Opus 3.8)

chillfox• 25 days ago

Fugu Ultra [0] is not actually a model, it's a system (harness in the cloud?) that routes to several models, looks like it's a bit like OpenRouters Fusion [1].

  "Rather than a single monolithic model, Fugu is a learned multi-agent orchestration system: a language model trained to route tasks across a swappable pool of underlying models and to recursively call instances of itself." - https://openrouter.ai/sakana/fugu-ultra

[0] https://sakana.ai/fugu/ [1] https://openrouter.ai/openrouter/fusion

matheusmoreira• 25 days ago

I doubt it will rival Mythos or the upcoming Sol, and if it's not open weights it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Still, I applaud the asian LLM efforts and hope they keep up the pressure on the americans.

throwatdem12311• 25 days ago

wtf even is “mythos-like” when smaller models can find all the same kinds of issues if you just prod it a bit more

sheeshkebab• 25 days ago

unless they launched 10t param models, or figured out some amazing new way to compress as many params into say 100b, I doubt it's anywhere near "mythos level". and I have no idea how many params mythos has but that was just some hear say.

Hasan121212• 25 days ago

Competition is accelerating, but the next breakthrough isn't just better models it's better connectivity. AgentKey bridges AI agents with real-world tools, APIs, and data.

cloudengineer94• 25 days ago

Just like many comments have been saying here, I also tested Fugu and some others and what I noticed is that they are quite expensive models, 20$ is not enough to complete a full workflow which in Opus it's possible, sure you might need to improve your prompt from the get go with Opus if you want the best results but so far that's my experience.

My next test will be Agentic systems and see how they perform

dev_l1x_be• 25 days ago

GLM produces pretty decent websites.

Lockal• 25 days ago

I'm a simple man, I see no benchmarks at https://arena.ai/leaderboard - I can 100% tell this is a scam.

an0malous3• 24 days ago

How does this compare to ARC AGI?

terekhindc• 25 days ago

if fugu really is an orchestrator dispatching to opus/gpt under the hood (as the openrouter page suggests), the $20-in-one-prompt complaints actually start making sense — you're paying api markup twice.

Asian AI startups launch Mythos-like models

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