The RIO Incident

Reddit r/ArtificialInteligence 06/15/26, 01:13 PM News

open-source model-accusation ai-drama model-blending github-issue community-accountability

Summary

A dispute has arisen over Rio 3.5 Open 397B, with Nex-AGI claiming it is a blend of their model and Qwen, not independently trained; evidence includes model identity and weight matching.

A new dispute is unfolding around Rio 3.5 Open 397B, a model presented as an original public AI project from Rio. Nex-AGI opened a GitHub issue claiming the model is not independently trained, but instead closely matches a 60/40 blend of Nex-N2 Pro and Qwen. They say the model even identifies as “Nex” when the Rio system prompt is removed, and that the weights line up across all 60 layers. Source: [https://github.com/nex-agi/Nex-N2/issues/4](https://github.com/nex-agi/Nex-N2/issues/4?utm_source=chatgpt.com) This is the messy but valuable side of open source. A big public claim was made, the community was able to inspect it, and now the evidence is out in the open for everyone to judge. That kind of accountability can be uncomfortable, but it is exactly why open models matter.

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