Huawei’s AI Lab Denies Copying Alibaba’s Qwen Model Amid Copyright Claims

Huawei’s AI research division, Noah Ark Lab, has denied allegations that its Pangu Pro Moe (Mixture of Experts) large language model copied from Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 14B model. The lab insisted on Saturday that Pangu Pro was independently developed and trained, refuting claims made in a report by an entity named HonestAGI.

HonestAGI published a paper on GitHub claiming “extraordinary correlation” between Huawei’s Pangu Pro Moe and Alibaba’s Qwen model, suggesting that Huawei’s model might have been “upcycled” rather than trained from scratch. The report also raised concerns about potential copyright violations and false claims regarding Huawei’s investment in the model’s training.

In response, Noah Ark Lab stated that their model is not based on incremental training from other manufacturers’ models but instead includes key innovations in architecture and technical features. They highlighted that Pangu Pro is the first large-scale model built entirely on Huawei’s Ascend chips and confirmed adherence to open-source licensing rules for any third-party code used—though they did not specify which open-source models influenced their work.

Alibaba has yet to comment on the allegations, and the identity of HonestAGI remains unknown. The controversy comes amid rising competition in China’s AI sector, which has been accelerated by the release of open-source models like DeepSeek’s R1 and Alibaba’s Qwen family, designed for consumer and chatbot applications. In contrast, Huawei’s Pangu models are primarily applied in government, finance, and manufacturing sectors.