Indian AI institution 169Pi grandly unveiled its self-developed 9B multimodal reasoning model, Alpie Seed, on the day of Diwali, boasting impressive scores across multiple benchmarks. Yet just hours after the model weights were uploaded, it was discovered that the model is essentially Alibaba's Qwen3.5-9B—the developer had merely hard-coded three sentences of prompts into the chat template, forcing the model to publicly claim it was developed by 169Pi. Another model previously launched by the same institution was likewise simply fine-tuned from a Chinese open-source model, and its officially announced benchmark scores suffered from the same problem: the comparison data were not tested in a unified environment. This practice of lightly modifying open-source models and repackaging them as locally self-developed large models is an open secret in the industry. Going forward, a wave of small and medium-sized model projects touted under the banners of "sovereign AI" and "local self-development" will be exposed one after another—and many so-called local large models around the world are in fact built on Chinese open-source foundations.