US Federal Register website removes Qwen search — Jerusalem Post
On Wednesday, the website of the US Federal Register, which is managed by the National Archives, offered a search tool based on Qwen, a model by China’s Alibaba. It was soon removed from the resource that publishes a daily list of newly proposed federal regulations and allows users to view public comments on them.
As The Jerusalem Post reports, the Qwen-powered search disappeared around the time posts about it began appearing on social media. Screenshots and an archived version of the website’s source code reviewed by Reuters confirmed the presence of the tool. It was not specified when the Qwen model began to be used.
FBI accusations against Alibaba
Last week, the FBI accused Alibaba of “maliciously” copying models from the US company Anthropic to create its own artificial intelligence tools. US officials said at the time that Chinese AI companies were copying US technologies on an “industrial scale.” A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington called the accusations unfounded.
The FBI declined to comment on the situation on Thursday. The National Archives and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.
Assessments of possible risks
Qwen is an open-weight model: key components of the system are publicly available, allowing developers to download and adapt it for their own needs. Security experts note that such models can be run on an organization’s own IT infrastructure, giving users greater control over data.
Georgetown University law professor Anupam Chander believes that the use of Qwen on the Federal Register website did not create an obvious immediate cybersecurity risk, although this depends on how the model was trained. According to him, the website contains already public information, meaning the model did not process sensitive government data. At the same time, Democratic Senator Mark Warner said that the level of risk depends on whether data left the protection perimeter of the US government and whether it was processed by systems controlled by Alibaba.
Republican John Moolenaar, chairman of the US House committee on China, said that no federal agency should use a Chinese AI model because, in his view, this increases the government’s dependence on Chinese technology.
