A government tool used for searching proposed federal regulations was powered by an AI model from China before it was taken offline Wednesday. The National Archives oversaw the system that used Alibaba's Qwen to help users browse public documents, despite recent allegations by the FBI that the company engaged in "malicious" copying of technology from Anthropic.

The Federal Register website integrated the open-weight model to search public-facing content. Experts cited by Reuters noted that this specific application did not present an immediate security risk, although US officials had previously accused Alibaba of using illicit model distillation to build the system.