The Federal Register website briefly used an open source Chinese AI search tool. On Wednesday, US government officials removed a Chinese AI search tool that was briefly deployed on the Federal Register website, 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. Earlier this month, the FBI named Alibaba among six leading Chinese firms allegedly conducting “industrial-scale distillation.”

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. So far, the independent agency has not commented on the removal and did not respond to Ars’ request for comment. The White House and the FBI have also not commented. 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 Reuters’ report noted that an archived version of the site’s source code confirmed that the Qwen model was taken down on Wednesday, so the service was available for at least a day.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. It also matters if any US data was processed by “Alibaba-controlled systems,” Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) said. However, experts told Reuters that it’s unlikely the Qwen model’s deployment on the Federal Register site posed any substantial risks. Chander noted that the site’s content is “already public, so the model was not working with sensitive government information.”

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. 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, security experts told Reuters. The ability to avoid sharing sensitive data is partly why it has become a “default” AI search tool, Sina.com reported, along with its lower, more predictable pricing. These models could arguably not even be considered Chinese services once a business takes control of them, Sina.com’s report suggested. But 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.