September 18, 2026
US Federal Register removes Qwen search: the mode vanished after September 17 reports
On September 17, Federal Register removed search based on Alibaba's Qwen model, which the FBI had called malicious. Reuters confirmed the removal using screenshots and an archived version of the site's source code.
On September 16, Document Search offered five modes: Semantic, Keyword Only, Neural msmarco-distilbert-base-tas-b, and two Qwen3:0.6B modes. One of them was called Hybrid Qwen3:0.6B and included the parameters 512D, Recursive Splitting, Distilled, and Prefixed.
Now. On September 18, only Keyword Only and Semantic remained on the official FederalRegister.gov page. Federal Register is run by the National Archives, and Reuters verified the removal using screenshots and an archived version of the site's source code.
Qwen3-0.6B is a small open-weight Alibaba model under Apache 2.0 with 28 layers and a 32K context window. A developer can download and modify it, while self-hosted infrastructure offers more control over sensitive data. The official model card suggests `pip install vllm`, then `vllm serve \"Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B\"`; a compatible API runs at `localhost:8000`.
As of September 18, FederalRegister.gov left only Keyword Only and Semantic for search.
