The U.S. government's moves to restrict access to top AI systems from Anthropic and OpenAI have sparked growing interest in open-source models, especially from China. In early June, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to block non-Americans from using its closed models Mythos 5 and Fable 5, leading the startup to pull the models offline entirely. Shortly after, OpenAI agreed to let the government approve every customer for its newest model, GPT-5.6. Haitham Mengad, co-founder of Stems Labs, said the Mythos episode "was a powerful moment" for seeing open source as an alternative. Around the same time, China's Zhipu AI released GLM-5.2, an open model that performed nearly as well as top offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI on several benchmarks. On OpenRouter, Google, Anthropic and OpenAI's combined share of usage dropped from 55 percent to 33 percent between January and June, with China's open DeepSeek now leading by a clear margin. "You want to be as flexible as you can be," said Oren Michels, co-founder and CEO of Barndoor AI.