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Huawei’s AI Pangu Model Under Fire for “Copying” Alibaba’s Qwen: Huawei’s AI Lab Rejects Claims

  • August 22, 2025
    Updated
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⏳ In Brief

  • Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Lab rejects claims its Pangu Pro MoE model copied Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 14B

  • Allegations stem from HonestAGI’s GitHub post citing “extraordinary correlation”

  • Huawei insists Pangu Pro MoE was independently built and trained on Ascend chips

  • The lab confirms the use of open-source code under proper licensing

  • Alibaba has not publicly responded; the accuser remains anonymous


🧠 Lab Officials Reject Copying Allegations

Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Lab has come out swinging against accusations that its flagship Pangu Pro MoE language model was derived from Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 14B model.

The controversy erupted when an anonymous GitHub user, HonestAGI, published a technical critique claiming an “extraordinary correlation” in outputs and architecture between Pangu Pro MoE and Qwen 2.5 14B.

“We categorically deny any suggestion that Pangu Pro MoE was built on or trained from Alibaba’s Qwen,” said a lab spokesperson.

Huawei emphasizes that Pangu Pro MoE’s design and training pipeline were developed entirely in-house.


🔍 Open-Source Components and Licensing

Huawei acknowledges that open-source libraries were used in Pangu Pro MoE’s preprocessing and tooling pipelines.

The lab confirms it complied fully with MIT, Apache, and other open-source licenses, attributing and packaging code according to each project’s terms.

“All third-party code was incorporated under clear license terms; no proprietary model weights were reused,” the spokesperson added.

Proper licensing and attributions are central to Huawei’s AI development governance.


🌐 Industry Context and Competitive Stakes

This clash emerges amid an intensifying rivalry among China’s AI giants. HuaweiAlibabaBaidu, and others are each vying to lead in large-scale language models and agentic AI services.

Huawei’s Pangu Pro MoE, open-sourced on GitCode in June 2025, targets enterprise and government use cases, offering a mixture of experts architecture for high-throughput tasks.

By contrast, Alibaba’s Qwen series focuses more on consumer and developer ecosystems, integrating into e-commerce and cloud services.

Allegations of copying threaten reputations and could slow industry collaboration on open innovation.


🛡️ Next Steps and Industry Implications

Huawei plans to commission an independent audit of its codebase and model training logs to prove the originality of its code definitively.

Meanwhile, Alibaba has stayed silent, and HonestAGI’s GitHub notice was swiftly removed, leaving technical details scarce and fueling speculation.

Industry observers warn that such disputes may spur calls for standardized AI provenance tools to track datasets and the lineage of architecture.

“In a maturing AI field, transparency around model provenance is non-negotiable,” stated Dr. Mei Lin, an AI ethics researcher.


📌 Conclusion

Huawei’s forceful denial of model copying underscores the high stakes in the AI model arena.

As Pangu Pro MoE and Qwen continue to evolve, both labs must strike a balance between open collaboration and stringent intellectual property safeguards—or risk eroding trust in China’s burgeoning AI ecosystem.


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7th July 2025:

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Khurram Hanif

Reporter, AI News

Khurram Hanif, AI Reporter at AllAboutAI.com, covers model launches, safety research, regulation, and the real-world impact of AI with fast, accurate, and sourced reporting.

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Outside of work, Khurram squads up in Call of Duty and spends downtime tinkering with PCs, testing apps, and hunting for thoughtful tech gear.

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