On July 8, 2025, Huawei, a Chinese company, released their AI large model named “Pangu”. Following the accusations by the research team HonestAGI that it bears a striking resemblance to Alibaba’s AI model Qwen-2.5 14B model, another individual claiming to be an internal employee of Huawei has come forward to expose allegations of plagiarism within the company and issued a “not suicidal” statement.
On July 6, an individual claiming to be an employee of Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Laboratory anonymously posted a lengthy 6000-word article on Github titled “The Tragedy of Pangu: The Bitterness and Darkness in the Development Process of Huawei’s Noah Pangu Large Model,” revealing issues of fraudulent activities and internal conflicts within Huawei regarding their AI large model.
The employee revealed in the article that they were involved in the development of the Pangu large model. Faced with the discussions on the internet accusing the Pangu model of plagiarism, they expressed difficulty sleeping at night and decided to disclose what they witnessed during the development process.
According to the article, during the development of the Pangu AI large model, internal conflicts within Huawei led to slow progress. Seeing the increasing gap with domestic competitors, internal doubts, and pressures from higher-ups, the team’s research work was in a state of “crisis”.
The article mentioned that in such a situation, the laboratory director, Wang Yunhe, resorted to replicating the technology of competitors on a large scale in a short period, resulting in an average improvement of around 10 points in various indicators. This was considered their first successful attempt at applying the replicated technology to the large model.
The author stated that Huawei, being an “outsider leading insiders,” the executives had no concept of this type of plagiarism and mistakenly thought it was some kind of “algorithm innovation” by the development team.
The article revealed that Huawei’s Pangu large model had been replicated from competitors’ AI products such as Alibaba’s Qianwen and DeepSeek multiple times.
The whistleblower claimed that intense internal struggles within Huawei led to the rapid loss of talented individuals working on large models in the company.
Finally, the whistleblower explicitly stated that they are “not suicidal.” They wrote, “After writing so much, certain individuals may want to expose and eliminate me. The company may also want to silence me or even hold me accountable. If that happens, my and even my family’s personal safety and lives may be threatened.”
The whistleblower expressed that they will publicly report their safety to everyone daily.
This disclosure sparked discussions on overseas social media platforms:
– “Huawei’s fabrication is nothing new. Products from several years ago can still be sold for tens of thousands. Huawei, like the CCP, is surrounded by enemies and facing criticism everywhere, much like the increasing dislike towards the Chinese government online. What goes around comes around.”
– “From government to companies, from officialdom to private individuals! Fake emptiness prevails!”
– “After reading this, it seems this programmer is still very brainwashed, firmly held by Huawei’s ’emotions,’ and has yet to see the social reality and essence of Huawei clearly. However, I admire his courage, which is now very rare.”
Previously, on June 30, Huawei officially released the open-source Pangu 7B parameter dense model and the Pangu Pro MoE 72B hybrid expert model, along with their model inference technology based on Ascend chips.
However, the Pangu large model quickly became embroiled in a plagiarism scandal, transforming into a highly publicized event within the Chinese AI industry.
On July 4, the research team “HonestAGI” published a technical analysis report on the software code hosting platform GitHub, accusing Huawei’s “Pangu” large model of a high degree of similarity with Alibaba’s “Qianwen-2.5 14B” model, with a correlation coefficient as high as 0.927, far exceeding the industry standard of 0.7.
The research suggested that this similarity indicated Huawei’s model might have been “upcycled” rather than trained from scratch.
In response, on July 5, Huawei released a statement denying plagiarism but admitting that some basic component codes were “referenced from industry open-source practices,” claiming that code related to other open sources “complied with open-source license requirements.”
Reuters reported that Huawei introduced the first generation of the Pangu model in 2021, stepping into the field of large models early on but has been consistently seen as lagging behind competitors.