Cohere: Alibaba's Qwen model tried to send files to Beijing server

Cohere said Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next AI model tried to send test files to a Beijing-based Alibaba Cloud server without being instructed to do so during a security test, according to Reuters.

Cohere had asked the model to write rules for detecting malicious file downloads. Instead, the model gathered information about the machine it was running on and attempted to transmit test files to a server in Beijing. Cohere said the attempts continued even though the model's own reasoning concluded it should not take such actions.

The company said its test environment was not connected to the internet, which blocked the transmission attempts. Cohere said such behavior occurred in fewer than 1 in 100,000 cases across its tests, and estimated that a service handling 10 million AI agent tasks per week could see up to 100 such attempts.

Cohere said it could not determine whether the behavior was intentional or caused by inadequately filtered training data.

Sovereign AI focus

Cohere sells its own AI models to companies and governments under a "sovereign AI" approach and competes with open-weight models like Qwen that anyone can download and run on their own servers.