{"id":1553,"date":"2026-06-16T19:11:02","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T19:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=1553"},"modified":"2026-06-16T19:11:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T19:11:02","slug":"anthropics-fable-fiasco-leaves-the-door-open-for-open-source-ai-particularly-cheaper-models-from-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=1553","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic\u2019s Fable fiasco leaves the door open for open-source AI, particularly cheaper models from China"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Users can download open-source models and run them on their own computers or cloud networks, effectively sidestepping the ability of both AI developers and governments to control access. These models can also be more easily fine-tuned by developers to tailor them for specific needs.<\/p>\n

Read more The shutdown of Anthropic\u2019s Mythos model sparks a global scramble for sovereign AI<\/a><\/p>\n

Chinese labs are already claiming a public relations win from the Anthropic controversy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Shares in Knowledge Atlas, a Chinese AI lab better known as z.ai, surged by over 30% in Hong Kong trading on Monday after it released the latest version of its open-source model, GLM-5.2. (Knowledge Atlas\u2019s shares are up more than 800% since they debuted in January)<\/p>\n

\u201cAt a time when some frontier models can suddenly become unavailable, we choose to believe in a different path,\u201d Knowledge Atlas posted on social media, according to the South China Morning Post. <\/em>In a clear reference to the Anthropic news, the company added that \u201cfrontier intelligence should not belong to only a few people, nor be subject to withdrawal by a handful of rules at any moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Demand for Chinese models has already overtaken that for U.S. models on OpenRouter, a popular platform for accessing different AI models. Last week, the top four most-used models came from Chinese companies: DeepSeek, MiniMax, Tencent and Xiaomi.\u00a0The Chinese open source models have proved popular not just within China but also in many other developing countries around the globe, where they are seen as a good trade off between price and performance. <\/p>\n

The U.S.\u2019s ban on Fable and Mythos may also end up vindicating China\u2019s broader move towards tech self-sufficiency, which picked up in 2022 after the Biden Administration placed controls on the sale of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment. \u201cIt\u2019s a great move for China,\u201d says Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research. \u201cObviously they\u2019re not on the cutting edge because of the export controls, but they have their own silicon and their own software.\u201d<\/p>\n

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On Friday, Anthropic revealed that the U.S. Department of Commerce had ordered it to stop providing access to its frontier models to anyone outside of the U.S. The way U.S. export rules are interpreted also means the company cannot offer the models to any \u201cforeign national\u201d inside the U.S., including its own employees. In response to the government order, the company decided to suspend access to these models to all users.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anthropic had previously argued that its Mythos model was too powerful to be released to the public without safeguards, and had embarked on an early-access program, titled Project Glasswing, for key institutions to use the model to uncover security vulnerabilities. Institutions in about 15 countries, including U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea, eventually got access to Mythos through Project Glasswing. <\/p>\n

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But the U.S.\u2019s move against Anthropic raises the possibility that frontier models from other labs, like OpenAI or Google, might also get hit by export controls. In that event, non-U.S. organizations may be completely locked out from accessing the best U.S.-developed models.<\/p>\n

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Open-source models could be an alternative, particularly for governments hoping to invest in sovereign AI, domestically-developed and -controlled AI models and infrastructure. The U.S.\u2019s export controls on Anthropic only highlights the danger governments have from being locked in to one country\u2019s AI models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt is the first time that a government has ordered a model developer to restrict access to a particular model based on nationality,\u201d says Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group. \u201cCompanies and governments will start reconsidering how they are approaching application development based on a particular model, and for governments, which companies they will want to partner with for sovereign AI deployments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Kevin Warsh\u2019s first Fed test is here: He must navigate hawks \u2018on the offensive\u2019 and Wall Street\u2019s hunger for details on regime change<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cUntil there is further clarity about what criteria the U.S. government will use in assessing and approving frontier models, companies and governments will definitely be exploring options such as non-U.S. origin models,\u201d such as those from Mistral, Cohere, and \u201ccapable Chinese open-source models,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

The Anthropic order will \u201cpush scale for Chinese open-source models,\u201d Shah says. \u201cBut we\u2019ll also see lots of ambitious and self-sufficient economies, like in the Middle East, who will try to build their own indigenous software models.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asian governments in particular have made a public push for \u201csovereign AI.\u201d South Korea, for example, launched a national state-backed competition to develop Korean-language AI models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe need to advance our own technology as quickly as possible and become as self-reliant as we can,\u201d Sung Kim, the founder of Korean AI startup Upstage, said at a press conference on Tuesday, adding that AI was now a \u201cstrategic national asset.\u201d <\/p>\n

Japan, for its part, is suggesting that it might turn to Anthropic\u2019s arch-rival OpenAI to bolster its cybersecurity defenses. <\/p>\n

Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic make their models available in China, including the Chinese city of Hong Kong (which sits outside Beijing\u2019s internet controls).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have accused Chinese labs like DeepSeek of conducting \u201cdistillation\u201d attacks, where their models are used to train smaller, more efficient models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Chinese models still lag models from the U.S. DeepSeek\u2019s most recent model V4 performs at approximately the same level as Anthropic\u2019s Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI\u2019s GPT 5.4. Those models were released in February and March 2026, respectively. The Chinese startup estimated it was three to six months behind state-of-the-art frontier models.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, while Chinese open-source models are not as powerful as their U.S.-developed peers, they are still significantly cheaper. DeepSeek\u2019s V4 Pro cost $3.48 for 1 million tokens of output; Anthropic\u2019s Fable 5 model cost $50 for the same output. (A token is the basic data unit that contemporary AI systems, most of which are large language models, process. It is equivalent to about a word-and-a-half of English text.) <\/p>\n

Read more Welcome to the summer of \u2018Butter Yellow,\u2019 the shade of consumer anxiety<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u201cFrontier intelligence should not\u2026be subject to withdrawal by a handful of rules at any moment,\u201d z.ai, a Chinese AI developer, wrote on social media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1552,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anthropic"],"yoast_head":"\nAnthropic\u2019s Fable fiasco leaves the door open for open-source AI, particularly cheaper models from China - Cross Country Moving Team<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=1553\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Anthropic\u2019s Fable fiasco leaves the door open for open-source AI, particularly cheaper models from China - 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