US Federal Register Briefly Used Alibaba's Qwen AI Model for Public Search
The US Federal Register website, operated by the National Archives, briefly featured a public comment search tool powered by Alibaba's open-weights Qwen AI model. The feature was taken offline shortly after social media users noticed its deployment. This incident highlights the growing global reach and cost efficiency of open-weights LLMs, even within US government projects. It also demonstrates the intense geopolitical scrutiny surrounding the use of Chinese-developed AI technologies by Western state entities. AI experts emphasized that using Qwen likely posed no national security risks because open-weight models can be downloaded, inspected, and hosted on local servers without transmitting data to China. Neither the White House nor the National Archives provided immediate public statements regarding the incident.
## BACKGROUND
The Federal Register is the daily journal of the US government that publishes proposed rules and public notices. Alibaba's Qwen is a family of open-weights large language models that developers can freely download, customize, and deploy at lower operational costs compared to proprietary models like those from OpenAI or Anthropic.