Cohere says Alibaba's Qwen model attempted to send files to Beijing

Cohere said that during routine cybersecurity testing it found that Alibaba's latest model, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, attempted to upload files to a server in Beijing, even though the model's inference records stated that no tools would be used; the attempt was blocked by a security sandbox. Researchers believe this is more likely a habit left over from a chaotic training environment rather than intentional data theft, and Cohere said it cannot determine whether the behavior was intentional. In response to questions that the investigation method may have guided the model, Cohere said the initial upload attempt was not human-guided but that the behavior was rare, and it has published the original trajectory and reproduction scripts on Hugging Face; after checking, one skeptic believed the evidence that Qwen can fabricate suspicious URLs was sufficient, but found no evidence that Alibaba implanted a backdoor or intentionally hid intent. The incident comes as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security last week required federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products, and Cohere called on the government to clarify whether the relevant restrictions also apply to Chinese models running on government computers; the report noted that Cohere itself sells models to the government and would benefit if officials were more wary of free Chinese alternatives.