Brief

A purported new open-source AI model, Rio-3.5-Open-397B, launched by Rio de Janeiro's IT company IplanRIO, has been accused of being a repackaged version of existing models, specifically a mix of Alibaba's Qwen 3.5 and Nex-AGI's Nex N2 Pro. The model gained rapid popularity for its claimed 397B parameters and open-source MIT license, but faced immediate scrutiny from the AI development community. IplanRIO has since apologized, attributing the release to an operational error where they mistakenly uploaded a merged baseline version instead of their independently trained model, and plan to re-upload a properly distilled and post-trained version. AI

The City of Rio de Janeiro's IT agency, IplanRIO, claimed to have developed an original 397-billion-parameter AI model named Rio-3.5-Open-397B. This model reportedly outperformed Alibaba's Qwen 3.7 Plus on several coding and reasoning benchmarks, generating significant public attention. However, an investigation by Nex-AGI revealed that Rio-3.5-Open-397B was not an original creation but rather a direct merge of Nex-AGI's Nex-N2-Pro model and Alibaba's Qwen3.5-397B-A17B base, with the model even identifying itself as Nex-AGI's creation when prompted. AI