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

Nous Research fine-tuned Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B on about 53 million tokens to create Arete-27B, which cuts its propaganda rate from 22 percent to 0.9 percent while keeping general capabilities roughly intact. The team built an 803-prompt test across seven categories and judged responses with Grok 4.7, finding Western models below one percent and GLM-5.3 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 15 and 16 percent. Nous concludes the bias layer in Chinese-aligned models is shallow, applied late and thin, and removable without disturbing anything underneath.