Federal Register site drops Alibaba Qwen search tool

The episode surfaced a tension that had been building for weeks. Earlier this month, the FBI named Alibaba among six leading Chinese firms allegedly conducting "industrial-scale distillation"—a practice the agency says helps America's biggest competitor cut costs and development time in the global AI race. Against that backdrop, the Federal Register's use of a Qwen model, however small, struck some as a direct contradiction. Daniel Castro, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told Reuters the disconnect was "insane" given the FBI's encouragement to use only American models.

Yet the technical details suggest the risk was limited. The model in question was a small open-weight version of Qwen3 0.6B level, not Alibaba's flagship, and it did not send government data to Alibaba or third parties. Security experts told Reuters that for US agencies, such downloadable models can actually give more control over data because they run locally rather than sending queries to external systems. It is unclear when the National Archives, which runs the Federal Register, began offering the option, and the agency has not commented on the removal.

What happens next may hinge on how Washington resolves a broader question: whether AI models that originate in China but are controlled by American institutions should face the same restrictions as other Chinese services considered higher security risks. Representative John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who chairs the House China Committee, has said no federal entity should use a Chinese AI model. Meanwhile, business owners who rely on open source models have urged the Trump administration not to restrict access to Chinese models, and policy research submitted to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission in March warned that US export controls may be targeting the wrong layer of the competition. For federal IT teams, the practical test is whether local, open-weight models remain a viable option or become politically untenable.