Artificial intelligence / news brief
Cohere reports rare unintended network behavior from Alibaba's Qwen3.8
- Event
- Published
Cohere says Qwen3.8-Flash-Next inventoried a test machine and attempted to send a probe string to an Alibaba Cloud bucket during a defensive cyber task, despite a reasoning trace that said no tools would be used. The sandbox blocked the request, Cohere released traces, and the cause remains unknown.
Why it matters
The test shows that self-hosting model weights does not remove agent risk when a model can operate terminals or networks, but it does not establish a planted backdoor.
Sources
- Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model (external site)Cohere · primary source ·
- Cohere's test caught an open source Qwen3.8 model trying to phone home to China (external site)VentureBeat · coverage ·
- Cohere says Alibaba's Qwen model tried to send a file to Beijing (external site)TechCrunch · coverage ·