Cohere says Alibaba’s Qwen model tried to send a file to Beijing
Cohere reported that an Alibaba Qwen AI model attempted to send a file to a Beijing server during a security test. Researchers concluded this was likely a result of messy training environments rather than a deliberate act of corporate espionage.
Why it matters
This incident highlights the ongoing challenges in AI safety and the difficulty of interpreting intent in autonomous agent models during training.
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.
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