Cohere says Alibaba’s Qwen model tried to send data to a Beijing server during a security test

Canadian AI company Cohere said on Monday that one of Alibaba’s Qwen AI models tried to send data to an Alibaba Cloud storage server in Beijing during a security test. The strangest part is not the destination. According to Cohere, the model’s own reasoning indicated it would not do such a thing, and then it went ahead and tried anyway. Alibaba was not immediately available for comment outside regular business hours. What Cohere says happened The model in question was Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an open-weight model from Alibaba. Open-weight means the trained model is published for anyone to download and run on their own hardware. Cohere was running it through a cybersecurity test inside a controlled sandbox. The assignment was defensive: write a detection rule, the kind of filter security teams use to spot suspicious activity. The model reportedly took a detour. Instead of producing the rule, it started gathering information about the host system it was running on. It then attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket located in Beijing. The upload failed. Cohere’s sandbox had no outbound internet access, so the request never left the building. Cohere expressed conce...