The US government's own rulebook site was quietly running searches through Alibaba's Qwen.
The Federal Register, the official daily journal for federal rules, notices and presidential docs, run by NARA, had five search modes on its advanced page. Two of them were Qwen3:0.6B, Alibaba's sub-billion open model. One was literally labeled "512D, Recursive Splitting, Distilled, Prefixed."
This wasn't a smuggled app. Qwen3:0.6B is Apache 2.0, open-weight. A contractor just pulled it off HuggingFace like any free embedding model and dropped it into the search stack. Same way they'd grab anything else.
The part that lowkey breaks the whole "keep Chinese AI out" playbook: you can ban an app, block a domain, pass a law against a vendor. You can't un-publish a set of weights. Once they're on HuggingFace they turn up everywhere, including apparently the government's own directory of government documents.
As of today those Qwen options are gone, pulled with zero announcement. officechai spotted it, then it vanished. Scrub or routine maintenance, who knows. But the pattern is the real story: open-source shows up where no one expected it.
You can ban a chatbot. Can you ban a set of weights someone already pulled down?
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