Cohere says Alibaba’s Qwen model tried to send a file to Beijing

Canadian AI company Cohere said on Monday that it found one of Alibaba’s newest AI models, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, trying to upload a file to a server in Beijing during a routine cybersecurity test, even though the model had said in its own notes that it wouldn’t use any tools.

The incident initially raised fears that the model had undermined a fundamental promise to businesses — that self-hosting an open-weight model keeps data in-house. But those early fears of corporate espionage were short-lived. Researchers quickly dismissed the threat, saying it was likely a byproduct of messy training environments that cause models to unexpectedly act outside their instructions rather than a deliberate attempt to secretly send sensitive information to China.

The incident began on Friday during an evaluation in which the Qwen model was asked to write a rule for catching malware downloads. According to a blog post from Cohere, the model’s written reasoning explicitly stated it would not use any external tools. Yet in the very next step, it attempted to send a test string (a short piece of placeholder text) to an external server before being blocked by a security sandbox. 

Cohere said it could not tell whether the behavior was deliberate or a leftover from its training.