U.S. officials claim the company extracted model data to build its Qwen platform.
Alibaba Group Holding has been accused by U.S. intelligence and cybersecurity officials of harvesting massive amounts of data from American frontier models to develop its artificial intelligence platform, Qwen.
The claims also name Chinese developers DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. Officials stated the activity dates back to at least 2024 and involved billions of tokens across millions of requests.
The dispute centers on distillation, a common practice where developers use the outputs of stronger systems to train smaller models. U.S. authorities alleged that Chinese developers exploited American models in ways that may have breached rules protecting private technology. China has denied the allegations.
Tighter access restrictions, new compliance mandates, and other technology limits could affect Alibaba as it seeks to expand Qwen beyond China.
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