State propaganda in some Chinese AI models is only "a thin layer" that fine-tuning can strip away
AI-generated summary Nous Research fine-tuned Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B on 53 million tokens to create Arete-27B and reduce Chinese state propaganda rates from 22 percent to under one percent. According to Nous, the resulting open-weight model maintains its general capabilities while dropping the propaganda rate and increasing factual accuracy.