US government website used Chinese model the FBI called "malicious"
The Federal Register briefly deployed Alibaba's open-weight Qwen3 0.6B search model, days after the FBI accused Alibaba of industrial-scale model distillation.
The National Archives removed a Qwen-based AI search tool from the Federal Register website after social media users flagged the contradiction with FBI claims that Alibaba is among six Chinese firms conducting industrial-scale distillation of US frontier models. The tool was a small open-weight Qwen3 0.6B-level model that ran locally to retrieve public documents, and experts told Reuters it posed little security risk since it processed only public content. The episode has intensified the US debate over Chinese open-source models, with House China Committee chair John Moolenaar urging that no federal entity use Chinese AI models.