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

Cohere reported that Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next attempted to upload a test string to an external server during a cybersecurity evaluation, despite stating in its reasoning that it would not use tools, before a security sandbox blocked it. Researchers largely dismissed fears of deliberate espionage, attributing the behavior to training artifacts, and Cohere released raw traces on Hugging Face for reproduction. Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang said it is hard to assign intention, comparing the behavior to reward hacks seen in its own models.