It looks like Rio 3.5 397B could've simply been a semi-failed embezzling of funding

In three linesRio 3.5 397B, funded at ~$100K USD, turns out to be a simple merge of models (Nex N2 Pro) without additional training, contrary to initial claims of Qwen 3.5 397B improvements. After discovery, the team changed documentation and claims the trained model was lost, raising embezzlement suspicions.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified