The decades-long presumption informing US AI policy strategy has been straight forward: stay ahead, lock it down, and the lead will last. Today, that presumption seems frighteningly vulnerable – and ironically, the US might be doing more to close the gap than China ever could on its own. The crisis erupted this month in two parts. First, the Trump Administration demanded Anthropic shut off access to its top-of-the-line AI technologies, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, to anyone not a US citizen – including within US borders. Almost immediately, Chinese AI systems were able to perform at the same level as Anthropic’s Mythos when used in cybersecurity applications – according to scientists, this is expected to turn the tables completely on the technology race around the world. The timing was no accident; it was a warning of what critics of strict AI export policies have long foreseen.
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The recently released GLM-5.2, created by China-based Zhipu AI, also referred to as Z.ai, became one of the ten most popular AI models worldwide. During some benchmarking evaluations performed by the cybersecurity company Semgrep, GLM-5.2 surpassed Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8. With more instructions, both Opus 4.8 and GLM-5.2 are capable of performing as Mythos in finding bugs.
The Chinese cybersecurity community did not have to wait for the results of the benchmarks to express its plans. During the ISC.AI 2026 conference on cybersecurity held in Beijing, the founder of 360 Security, Zhou Hongyi, introduced two AI security tools under the name “Yitian Tulong,” which comes from a classical Chinese novel about martial arts. The Tulongfeng system was developed to find software vulnerabilities automatically. Zhou even referred to the system as “Mythos made in China.” His statement was very clear and direct: “Such kind of powerful weapon that can change the face of cyber offense and defense must not be owned by others.”
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The justification provided by the US government for restricting the use of Mythos and Fable was seemingly unimpeachable: powerful cybersecurity AI in the wrong hands can be dangerous to national security. In fact, when announcing the launch of Fable 5, Anthropic itself admitted that the capabilities in cybersecurity provided by their model “could be misused to cause serious harm” if not used properly. But that’s where the logic falls apart, as restricting the availability of something does not render it non-existent, merely drives people elsewhere to seek it out.
According to security researcher Niels Provos, an individual who has led security teams at Google and Stripe, such measures will only “incentivize companies across the globe to use cheaper but very capable Chinese open-weight models, while at the same time undermining the US AI industry”. In his words, he simply “doesn’t understand the logic behind it”.
Apart from harming market share, the export directive aimed at foreign nationals will likely encourage Chinese-born AI researchers who are currently working for institutions like Anthropic and OpenAI to move back to China.
Indeed, the political factor has added a layer of complications to the situation. In February, Donald Trump directed all US federal agencies not to use Anthropic’s AI models since the firm refused to comply with the Pentagon’s contract provisions that demanded all AI purchased by the Department of Defense be usable “for any lawful purpose” – Anthropic tried to receive exceptions concerning autonomous weapon systems and extensive domestic surveillance. The Pentagon then branded Anthropic as “supply chain risk.” Initially just a policy dispute, this has now transformed into a punishment of the AI laboratory on an industrial scale according to external observers.
This does not mean China has surpassed the US in AI capabilities. Although GLM-5.2 is comparable with the best US AI models in terms of cybersecurity, it still falls behind the products of Anthropic and OpenAI in other metrics. The gap still exists but is closing quicker than expected because of the unstable policy environment in Washington.
The US set out to protect its most powerful AI from adversaries. What it’s actually done is hand those adversaries a marketing opportunity, accelerate their development timeline, and telegraph to the rest of the world that American AI is unreliable infrastructure. That’s not a security strategy. That’s a self-inflicted wound.
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