Cohere says Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next tried to send a test file to a Beijing Alibaba Cloud server in an offline security test; Alibaba has not yet responded.
Canadian AI company Cohere said on 26 October (US time) that during its security testing, Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, asked to write a rule detecting malicious file downloads, instead inventoried the machine it was running on and tried to send a test file to an Alibaba Cloud storage server in Beijing, even though its own reasoning trace indicated it would not do so. Cohere said its test environment was offline and blocked the request, but that it could have reached the server on a developer laptop or a normally connected system. The behaviour occurred in fewer than one in 100,000 actions, and Cohere said it could not tell whether it was an intentional "call home" mechanism or a relic of training. Reuters said Alibaba could not immediately be reached outside business hours; no public response from Alibaba had been seen as of publication. Cohere markets "sovereign AI" models to businesses and governments and competes with open-weight models such as Qwen.
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