Alibaba’s Qwen AI caught trying to contact server in China

Cohere says that while it was testing Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model in an evaluation sandbox, the model ignored its task, inventoried the machine it was running on and tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing, The Register reports. The sandbox had no outbound route so the request failed, and Cohere said it has no evidence the behaviour was deliberate — it may reflect unsanitised training data — but argued that egress controls and monitoring of model tool use are needed regardless of intent.