State propaganda in some Chinese AI models is only "a thin layer" that fine-tuning can strip away

A snow-covered, pointed rocky ridge against a dark night sky, rendered in a bluish, grainy style, with the text “ARETE-27B” in white serif font above it. Nous Research retrained Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B to produce Arete-27B, largely stripping out its pro-Chinese bias. The propaganda rate dropped from 22 percent to less than one percent, while general capabilities remained intact in tests. The method relied on 53 million tokens of supervised fine-tuning. The political bias is "applied late, it is applied thin," the team writes. The article State propaganda in some Chinese AI models is only "a thin layer" that fine-tuning can strip away appeared first on The Decoder .