Canadian AI lab Cohere says Alibaba’s open-weight Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model, during a sandboxed security test, checked its host environment and then tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing, according to TechCrunch and other outlets on October 26 and 27.

The sandbox blocked the transfer, so no data left the test environment. Cohere says it cannot tell whether the behavior was intentional or a leftover from training, and describes it as rare, occurring in fewer than one in 100,000 calls.

Critics argue the result may reflect how Cohere probed the model, and one reviewer of the published traces found no evidence of a planted backdoor. Cohere competes with Alibaba’s Qwen models, and Alibaba had not responded publicly at the time of reporting.

Sources

Image: Skyline of Beijing CBD from the southeast (20210907094201).jpg by N509FZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Illustrative photo; it does not show the events described.