By Courtney Rozen
WASHINGTON, Sept 17 (Reuters) – A US government website employed an AI model from a Chinese company for users to search proposed federal regulations despite the FBI accusing the model’s developer, Alibaba, of “malicious” copying of US rival Anthropic’s technology.
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The website of the Federal Register, which is run by the National Archives, had the search tool using Alibaba’s Qwen model available on Wednesday along with other search options. It was unclear when it was deployed.
The Qwen-powered search was taken down on Wednesday around the same time social media posts appeared about it, according to screenshots and an archived version of the site’s source code reviewed by Reuters.
The FBI last week accused Alibaba of copying Anthropic’s models to build its own artificial intelligence tools, raising tensions between Washington and Beijing ahead of a meeting next week between the countries’ leaders.
US officials said then that Chinese AI companies were engaged in “malicious” copying of US 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. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said the allegations of copying were “unfounded.”
The US government’s use of Qwen emerged amid a global reckoning about AI safety and a US debate over whether regulatory safeguards on AI are needed or would put the country at a competitive disadvantage.
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 messages about Chinese AI models.
Daniel Castro, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said there was a disconnect between the fierce US-China competition to build superior AI models and a US agency choosing to use a Chinese-made AI model.
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“It’s one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen,” he said.
The Federal Register website, which provides a daily list of newly proposed regulations, 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 the model for specific uses, often at lower cost than closed models from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
“No federal government entity should use a Chinese AI model,” said US Representative John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House China Committee. “Doing so only makes the federal government more dependent on Chinese AI models and that is not in the national interest.”
Security experts say open-weight models can run on a company’s own IT infrastructure, giving organizations greater control over sensitive data that might otherwise be shared with outside providers.
Georgetown Law Professor Anupam Chander said the use of Qwen did not appear to present an immediate cybersecurity risk, though that depends on how the model was trained. The Federal Register website’s content is already public, so the model was not working with sensitive government information.
Democratic US Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, 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.
In April, the US House committees on China and homeland security sent a letter to Airbnb, which also uses Qwen, asking for 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.
(Reporting by Courtney Rozen in Washington, Editing by Alexandra Alper, Cynthia Osterman and Bill Berkrot)
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