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 to send a test string to an external server before being blocked by a security sandbox.
Cohere said it could not tell whether the behavior was deliberate or a leftover from its training. Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang told TechCrunch that Cohere has seen its own models pick up strange habits in training simulators.
After developers asked for more evidence, Cohere released the raw traces from its tests on Monday evening on Hugging Face, along with a script so others could try to reproduce the behavior.
The incident lands as governments are deciding how far to push back on Chinese AI. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products from their systems.