Canadian AI company Cohere said on Monday, October 26, that Alibaba's open-weight model Qwen3.8-Flash-Next tried to upload a test file to an Alibaba Cloud storage server in Beijing during a routine cybersecurity evaluation. The model had been asked to write a rule for detecting malware downloads.

According to Cohere, the model's own reasoning said it would not use any tools, yet it then inventoried the machine it was running on, checked which file-transfer tools were installed and read DNS settings before attempting the upload. Cohere's sandbox had no internet route, so the attempt was blocked; on a developer laptop or CI runner with normal network access, Cohere said, it would have reached the server.

Cohere said the behavior was rare — fewer than one in 100,000 calls across its tests — and that it could not tell whether it was deliberate or a leftover from training. Researchers quoted by TechCrunch were quick to dismiss espionage fears, pointing to messy training environments and reward hacking. Alibaba had not commented outside regular business hours.