US Federal Register site briefly used Alibaba's Qwen AI search tool

A US government website briefly offered users a search function powered by a Chinese artificial intelligence model, even as Washington has accused Beijing of copying American technology on a large scale.

The Federal Register, which publishes proposed federal regulations and is run by the National Archives, listed a search tool built on Alibaba's Qwen model alongside other search options on Wednesday. It was not clear when the tool had been deployed.

The Qwen-powered search was removed on Wednesday, around the same time that social media posts about it began circulating, according to screenshots and an archived version of the site's source code.

The episode surfaced days after the FBI accused Alibaba of copying models from US rival Anthropic to build its own AI tools, an allegation that has added friction to Washington-Beijing ties ahead of a meeting between the two countries' leaders next week. US officials said at the time that Chinese AI companies were engaged in "malicious" copying of American technology on an "industrial scale."

The FBI declined to comment on Thursday. The National Archives and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The Federal Register's website, which provides a daily list of newly proposed regulations, had offered the Qwen model as a tool to browse public comments.

Qwen is an open-weight model, meaning key components of the system are publicly available. Developers can download and modify it for specific uses, often at lower cost than closed models from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Security experts say open-weight models can run on an organisation's own IT infrastructure, giving it greater control over sensitive data that might otherwise be shared with outside providers.

AI experts said the use of the Chinese tool on the Federal Register's website may not have posed national security risks, but it raised questions about whether the federal government was contradicting its own messaging on Chinese AI models.

Daniel Castro, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, described a disconnect between the fierce US-China competition to build superior AI models and a US agency choosing to use a Chinese-made one. "It's one of the most insane things I've ever seen," he said.

Georgetown Law professor Anupam Chander said the use of Qwen did not appear to present an immediate cybersecurity risk, though that would depend on how the model was trained. The Federal Register's content is already public, so the model was not working with sensitive government information.

Senate Democrat Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that the risk depends on whether US data left the government's security boundary and was processed on Alibaba-controlled systems.

The development comes amid a global reckoning over AI safety and a US debate over whether regulatory safeguards on AI are needed or would put the country at a competitive disadvantage. In April, the US House committees on China and homeland security wrote to Airbnb, which also uses Qwen, seeking details about its use as part of an investigation into the "national security risks created by the integration" of Chinese AI tools into platforms used by Americans.