US government officials removed a Chinese AI search tool from the Federal Register website on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The change came after social media users noticed an apparent contradiction: The National Archives was using one of Alibaba’s Qwen AI models, even as top US law enforcement claimed that such models illegally copy US frontier models.

The FBI named Alibaba among six leading Chinese firms allegedly conducting “industrial-scale distillation” that the agency says is helping America’s biggest competitor cut costs and development time in the race for global AI leadership.

It’s unclear when exactly the National Archives, which runs the Federal Register website, began offering visitors the option to use a Qwen model to search public comments on proposed regulations.

The White House and the FBI have not commented on the removal. A screenshot shared on X showed the option displayed on the government website on September 15. Reuters’ report noted that an archived version of the site’s source code confirmed that the Qwen model was taken down on Wednesday, so the service was available for at least a day.

"It is an insane disconnect for a US agency to use an Alibaba model while the FBI encourages stakeholders to use only American models," said Daniel Castro, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Whether the government use of the Qwen model posed a security risk depends on how it was trained, Georgetown University Law Professor Anupam Chander told Reuters.

The Federal Register used a small open-weight model of “Qwen3 0.6B level,” which is not Alibaba’s largest flagship model.

That model is open source, serves solely to retrieve documents, and does not provide complex reasoning or send government data to Alibaba or any third parties.

For US agencies, the Qwen search tool gives the government more control over data because the models can be downloaded and run locally rather than requiring queries to be sent to larger models run externally.

The US has only recently started grappling with whether AI models that originate in China but are controlled by American institutions should face the same restrictions as other Chinese services considered higher security risks.

Source: arstechnica