The Federal Register, run by the National Archives, had a search feature powered by Alibaba's Qwen model live on its site as of Wednesday, September 17, 2026, then pulled it the same day social media posts called it out, according to Reuters, which reviewed screenshots and an archived copy of the site's source code. Days earlier, the FBI publicly accused Alibaba of what US officials called "malicious" copying of American AI technology on an "industrial scale." Anthropic told lawmakers in June that operators tied to Alibaba and its Qwen research unit ran a large-scale "distillation" campaign against its models between April 22 and June 5, 2026. The Chinese embassy in Washington called the copying allegations "unfounded." Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that the question is whether US data left the government's security boundary and got processed on servers Alibaba controls. It is unclear when the tool was first deployed, who approved it, or where the queries were routed.