The US National Archives briefly offered an Alibaba Qwen AI model to search public comments on the Federal Register website, before removing it after users highlighted an apparent conflict with FBI warnings about Chinese AI firms. The FBI has accused Alibaba and others of industrial-scale copying of American AI models, making the agency’s use of Qwen politically and strategically controversial.

The tool was reportedly available for at least a day and used a small, open-weight Qwen3 0.6B model that retrieved publicly available documents. Experts said the deployment was unlikely to pose a significant security risk because it apparently processed no sensitive information, could run locally without sending data to Alibaba, and offered predictable costs; however, concerns remain about how such models are trained and whether their Chinese origins should trigger restrictions.