Chinese authorities have held meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance and Z.ai over the past month about restricting overseas access to the country's most advanced AI models, including ones not yet released, Reuters reported, citing three people familiar with the discussions. The talks were led by the Ministry of Commerce. Officials floated making the leak or theft of proprietary AI technology an offence under China's national security law, and raised the idea of restricting who can fund domestic AI startups. Nothing is decided. The logic mirrors Washington's actions, as Beijing has been watching the fight over Anthropic's Mythos, a model built to automatically find software vulnerabilities. In June, the White House barred foreign nationals from accessing Mythos and Fable, and Anthropic responded by pulling both offline for everyone. Two of Reuters' sources said Chinese authorities are worried Washington could point Mythos at Chinese systems. Chinese models have sat above 30% of tokens used by US companies on OpenRouter each week since February, peaking at 46%. The 12-month average before that was 11%. Vercel says DeepSeek's usage share on its platform jumped from 1% in April to 23% in June.