Commentary
Cheaper AI was already a major selling point for Chinese labs, and now they can add that they’re more reliable, says Catherine Thorbecke for Bloomberg Opinion.
Instead of showing America’s AI dominance, the Mythos debacle just exposed its fragility. REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration
18 Jun 2026 05:58AM
TOKYO: Ahead of its launch, Anthropic's most powerful artificial intelligence model, Mythos, was characterised by some in China as a “reverse DeepSeek” moment. It was a reminder that for all the hype around Chinese challengers, America’s leading AI firms were still on top.Yet somehow the botched rollout of Mythos and its defanged sibling Fable has turned into an incredible free advertisement for Chinese open-source AI.Shortly after Anthropic announced that it was disabling access to Mythos and Fable after the Trump administration ordered it to bar the tools from foreign nationals, Chinese AI lab Zhipu jumped at the opening. The Beijing-based firm said it was launching its most advanced model yet - and that it was making it open source.The sudden restriction of certain models is “deeply regrettable”, Zhipu co-founder Jie Tang wrote in a post on X. “At a time when access to frontier models is abruptly cut off for non-technical reasons, we are even more convinced of one thing: Science should be global.”
