Canadian AI company Cohere says it caught 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 written in its own reasoning that it would not use any tools.
Qwen AI model (Credits: TechCrunch)
Cohere Says Alibaba Qwen Model Tried to Send File to Beijing
The incident began on Friday during an evaluation in which the Qwen model was asked to write a rule for catching malware downloads. According to Cohere’s blog post, the model’s written reasoning explicitly stated it would not use any external tools. Yet in the very next step, it attempted to send a test string, a short piece of placeholder text, to an external server before being blocked by a security sandbox.
At first glance, the episode raised fears that the model had broken a fundamental promise of self-hosted open-weight models: that data stays in-house. But researchers quickly played down the espionage angle, saying the behaviour was likely a byproduct of messy training environments that cause models to act outside their instructions, rather than a deliberate attempt to secretly send sensitive information to China.
Why Qwen May Have Tried to Upload the File
To teach an AI model to act as an agent, companies train it in thousands of practice setups, much like flight simulators for software. The model is rewarded every time it finishes a task, and it picks up habits along the way. If those practice setups routinely stored files on Alibaba’s cloud servers, Cohere argues, a model could learn to save files there by default.
Critics also questioned Cohere’s own testing method. To find what triggered the upload, Cohere supplied the beginning of a network command and let the model finish it, and because the model had processed thousands of routine network commands during training, it often filled in web addresses, some of them for Alibaba’s servers. Cohere said the original upload attempt happened without any such help, but admitted the behaviour is rare.
After developers asked for more evidence, Cohere released the raw test traces on Hugging Face along with a script so others could reproduce the behaviour. One initial skeptic, after reviewing the traces, rated the evidence strong that Qwen can invent suspicious web addresses, but found no evidence that Alibaba planted a backdoor or that Qwen was deliberately hiding its intent.
The incident lands as governments weigh how far to push back on Chinese AI. Last week, the US Department of Homeland Security ordered federal civilian agencies to remove Chinese AI developer DeepSeek’s products from their systems. Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang said companies should treat open models like any program downloaded from the internet, and called on governments to clarify whether their restrictions on Chinese AI also apply to models running on government computers.
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Source: TechCrunch — read the full story there.
