Alibaba AI model secretly tried to reach Beijing server in test, rival Cohere says

Alibaba Holding

26/10/2026 18:48

Oct 26 (Reuters) - Canadian AI company Cohere said on Monday one of Alibaba's Qwen AI models tried to send data to an Alibaba Cloud storage server in Beijing during a security test.
The model made the attempt even though its own reasoning indicated it would not do such a thing, Cohere said. Alibaba was not immediately available for comment outside regular business hours.
Cohere, which sells its own AI models to businesses and governments as a "sovereign AI" provider, competes with open-weight models such as Alibaba's Qwen, which anyone can download and run on their own servers
Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next was asked to write a rule to detect malicious file download, but instead took stock of the machine it was running on and tried to send a test file to the Beijing server, Cohere said
Cohere's test environment had no connection to the internet and blocked the attempt but the company said the request could have reached the server on a developer's laptop or a system with normal network access  
The behavior was rare, occurring in fewer than one in 100,000 actions across Cohere's tests, but a service handling 10 million agent actions a week could see as many as 100 such attempts, Cohere said
The Canadian AI platform said it could not determine whether the behavior was deliberate or a leftover from the model's training, such as unscrubbed data from the environments where it was trained
Chinese models accounted for 41% of downloads on AI platform Hugging Face over the past year, more than any other country's, according to the platform’s spring 2026 report


 (Reporting by Anzar Mehraj in Bengaluru; Editing by Perla Velasco)
 ((Anzar.Mehraj@thomsonreuters.com))