On Wednesday, US government officials removed a Chinese AI search tool that was briefly deployed on the Federal Register website, Reuters reported.
On X, a user with the handle “tleilax___” posted a widely shared screenshot showing the option displayed on the government website on September 15.
Daniel Castro, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told Reuters that it is an “insane” disconnect for a US agency to use an Alibaba model while the FBI encourages stakeholders to use only American models.
Although the FBI said that using Chinese models could create national security concerns by locking in the US government’s reliance on Chinese technology, experts told Reuters that it’s unlikely the Qwen model’s deployment on the Federal Register site posed any risks.
4 sentences from our version of the report,
chosen to cover it. Nothing here is written; every line is in the article below.
How
Summarized version
It’s unclear when exactly the National Archives began offering visitors the option to use a Qwen model to search public comments on proposed regulations. Reuters’ report noted an archived version of the site’s source code confirmed the Qwen model was taken down on Wednesday, so the service was available for at least a day.
Headline check
One of the two things this headline claims is not in the report.
The headline puts “malicious” in quotation marks. Nobody says those words anywhere in the report.
Figures, names and quoted words in the headline, looked for in the report itself — not in the summary above. How this is checked
The article, shortened and in plain language
On Wednesday, US government officials removed a Chinese AI search tool that was briefly deployed on the Federal Register website, Reuters reported.
Earlier this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (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.
On X, a user with the handle “tleilax___” posted a widely shared screenshot showing 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 Reuters’ report noted that an archived version of the site’s source code confirmed that the Qwen model was taken down on Wednesday, so the service was available for at least a day.
Daniel Castro, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told Reuters that it is an “insane” disconnect for a US agency to use an Alibaba model while the FBI encourages stakeholders to use only American models.
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.
Although the FBI said that using Chinese models could create national security concerns by locking in the US government’s reliance on Chinese technology, experts told Reuters that it’s unlikely the Qwen model’s deployment on the Federal Register site posed any risks.
In a report discussing the particular model used in greater depth, the Chinese news site Sina.com explained that the Federal Register used a small open-weight model of “Qwen3 0.6B level,” which is not Alibaba’s largest flagship model.
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