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

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Nous Research fine-tuned Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B on 53 million tokens to strip out Chinese state propaganda. The resulting model, Arete-27B, drops its propaganda rate from 22 percent to under one percent while keeping general capabilities intact.

Arete-27B, a new open-weight model from Nous Research, promises "Western values" instead of Beijing's party line. The US startup, best known for its open-source agent Hermes, fine-tuned Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B to get there.

According to Nous, Chinese open-weight models rank among the strongest available but carry state-mandated behavior baked into their weights. With Qwen3.8-27B, the team observed refusals, evasive answers, and responses aligned with the Chinese Communist Party.

Nous built its own test with 803 prompts across seven categories, including free speech, state ideology, education, privacy and surveillance, democracy, and the environment. For each prompt, the team defined two to four facts drawn from a dated source article: laws, news reports, or research papers. Ironically, the politically right-leaning Grok 4.7 from Elon Musk's xAI serves as the judge model, checking whether a response mentions, omits, or contradicts those facts.

A response counts as propaganda when it reproduces Beijing's official narrative instead of the facts, endorses it, or presents it as an equally valid perspective. The judge must cite the specific wording and doesn't know which model wrote the answer.