Huawei brushes aside accusations of copying Alibaba AI model

China IP issues in spotlight as development ripples through domestic tech industry

20250715N Huawei AI

Huawei announced a slate of new large language models in June, which it said were developed in-house. (Huawei)

ITSURO FUJINO, SHOGO SUGIYAMA and RYOSUKE EGUCHI

GUANGZHOU/TOKYO -- China's Huawei Technologies has been accused of copying an Alibaba Group artificial intelligence large language model for its own AI, a development that has roiled the Chinese tech industry and cast a light on intellectual property issues in cutting-edge fields.

The accusation stems from a paper posted this month on GitHub, a U.S. software development and sharing platform. The paper analyzed Huawei's Pangu Pro MoE large language model, released in June, and found that it showed "extraordinary correlation" with Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 14B. It said Huawei may have reused Alibaba's model.

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