Woofun AI reports that IplanRIO, an IT entity under the Rio de Janeiro municipal government, issued a statement addressing allegations that its Rio-3.5-Open-397B model plagiarized Nex-N2 Pro and Alibaba's Qwen 3.5. The company conceded that the model was not an independently trained base system but rather a product of fine-tuning and merging existing open-source architectures. IplanRIO attributed the release of a 'patchwork' linear combination to an operational error, stating they inadvertently uploaded an intermediate baseline version instead of the final distilled weights.

The agency further claimed that the final model weight file was lost, necessitating a retraining schedule and external validation before any future release. Consequently, the project's page on Hugging Face has been removed. This explanation has intensified scrutiny, with critics characterizing the incident as an embezzlement scheme where approximately $100,000 in public funds were allocated for training, yet only a zero-training patchwork was delivered.