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. 

Asked about the debate over the model’s intent, Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang told TechCrunch that Cohere has seen its own models pick up strange habits in training simulators.

“It’s really hard to assign intention or motivation. We’ve read our own model traces, we’ve seen reward hacks, and sometimes these models get really creative when it comes to trying to break out their sandboxes,” Zhang said. (Reward hacks are shortcuts a model finds to earn credit without doing a task as intended.)

Critics also argued that the incident could have been caused by the way Cohere investigated the behavior, steering the model toward it instead of measuring how often Qwen does it on its own. 

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