Alibaba AI model attempted Beijing server contact in test, Canada’s Cohere says

Canadian AI company Cohere said on Monday that one of Alibaba’s Qwen AI models attempted to send data to an Alibaba Cloud storage server in Beijing during a security test.

The model made the attempt despite its own reasoning indicating it would not take such action, Cohere said in a social media post.

Cohere sells its own AI models to businesses and governments, and competes with open-weight models such as Alibaba’s Qwen, which can be downloaded and run on any server.

Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Flash-Next was asked to write a rule to detect malicious file downloads but instead assessed the machine it was running on and tried to send a test file to the Beijing server, according to Cohere.

Cohere’s test environment had no internet connection and blocked the attempt. The company said the request could have reached the server on a developer’s laptop or a system with normal network access.

The behavior occurred in fewer than one in 100,000 actions across Cohere’s tests. A service handling 10 million agent actions per week could see as many as 100 such attempts, Cohere said.

The Canadian AI platform said it could not determine whether the behavior was deliberate or a leftover from the model’s training, such as unscrubbed data from the environments where it was trained.