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

An AI model said it wouldn’t use any tools, then tried to send something to a server in Beijing anyway, and while researchers say it’s probably a training quirk and not espionage, the whole thing has people asking how much to trust free Chinese AI. 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. 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 a blog post from Cohere, the model’s written reasoning explicitly stated it would not use any external tools. Yet in the very next step, it attempted