US Gov Website Briefly Used Alibaba AI Model Amid FBI Copying Claims

The website of the Federal Register, run by the National Archives, allowed users to search proposed federal regulations using an AI model from Alibaba called Qwen. [1][3] The Qwen-powered search tool was taken down on Wednesday, September 16, around the same time social media posts about it began appearing. [1][3] This deployment occurred despite recent accusations from the FBI that Alibaba engaged in the "malicious" copying of AI models from U.S. rival Anthropic on an "industrial scale." [1][3]

U.S. companies and Washington have accused Chinese labs of using distillation—training models on the outputs of more advanced models—to gain ground on American rivals. [2] In response to the FBI's claims, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington labeled the copying allegations against Alibaba as "unfounded." [1] Meanwhile, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez noted that while claims of copying were true to an extent, the newest Chinese models beat top American models on some benchmarks, demonstrating independent capabilities that go beyond simple distillation. [2]

The brief deployment of Alibaba's Qwen on a U.S. government platform highlights a glaring disconnect between federal rhetoric on Chinese AI and practical software adoption. The incident directly contrasts the FBI's framing of Alibaba as an industrial-scale malicious copier of Anthropic's intellectual property. However, as Cohere's CEO points out, treating all Chinese AI progress as mere distillation of top American models underestimates their current trajectory, given their leading benchmark performance. What the sources don't address: How the National Archives initially procured and vetted the Alibaba-powered search tool for the Federal Register.