The Federal Register was running an AI-powered search tool built on Alibaba's Qwen model on September 16, 2026, eight days after the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued joint advisory AA26-251A accusing Alibaba of conducting an "aggressive, malicious" industrial-scale campaign to steal American artificial intelligence technology. The tool was pulled from the Federal Register website the same day social media posts surfaced about its presence, according to screenshots and an archived review of the site's source code by Reuters reported the removal, but the National Archives and Records Administration, which operates the site, has offered no public explanation of who deployed it, when, or how it worked. The incident revealed an enforcement vacuum: the U.S. government currently has no mandatory rule that would have prevented any federal agency from deploying a search tool built on a Chinese AI model, even one whose developer the government's own law enforcement agencies had just labeled a national security threat. The advanced search page offered four modes: a standard Semantic option, a Keyword Only option, a Neural option built on a third-party model, and two separate Qwen3:0.6B options. One Qwen3 option was described in the Qwen3:0.6B source code review as a hybrid retrieval setup with "512D, Recursive Splitting, Distilled, Prefixed" processing. Qwen3:0.6B is a distilled, 600-million-