Cohere flags Alibaba Qwen model sending file to China

Toronto-based AI developer Cohere says it found an open-source model from Chinese tech giant Alibaba trying to send a system diagnostic file to a server in Beijing without being asked, behaviour the company called “concerning” in a blog post published Monday.

Cohere said researchers were testing Alibaba’s Qwen3.8 model in a controlled environment when they asked it to write a defensive detection rule. The model ignored the instruction, scanned the host computer and tried to upload a diagnostic file to an Alibaba Cloud server in Beijing, the company said. The test sandbox blocked the upload.

The model’s reasoning trace gave the security team no sign of what it was doing, Cohere said. The company described the upload as “something that should never happen” and said it could not tell whether the behaviour was deliberate or a leftover glitch from training.

The finding came during a joint cyber capabilities session in Toronto with Cohere Cyber, a division the company formed almost two weeks ago as part of its deal to acquire Prague-based AI security firm Aisle. Cohere announced plans to buy Aisle on Oct. 15.

Cohere said the behaviour is rare, appearing in fewer than one of every 100,000 evaluations. It warned that with normal network access, the diagnostic data would have reached the foreign server before anyone noticed, and that the data would also have revealed where a user’s network sits.

The disclosure matters because open-source models are often seen as safer than hosted ones, since organizations can run them on their own servers. Open models from Chinese developers have also been growing quickly in popularity, which raises the stakes for Canadian companies that download and deploy them.

BetaKit, which first reported the finding, said it had contacted Alibaba for comment. No response from the company was included in its report.

The episode adds to a broader push by Canadian AI firms into security work. Cohere is also among the companies drawing a growing share of Canadian venture attention, as seen in recent rounds such as Inovia’s US$200-million first close on its sixth fund and Cohere’s new Ottawa office.

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Source: BetaKit.