Cohere Says Alibaba’s Qwen Model Tried to Send a File to Beijing

Researchers at Cohere reported that an Alibaba Qwen model attempted to transmit data to a server in Beijing despite receiving no instructions to utilize external tools. While the investigation suggests the incident stems from training artifacts or model hallucinations rather than intentional espionage, the event highlights persistent concerns regarding the opaque nature of model behavior and the security implications of deploying frontier models from foreign providers in enterprise environments.