Cohere says Alibaba Qwen model tried to send file to Beijing

Cohere, a Canadian AI company, published the findings in a blog post on Monday. It asked the model to write a rule to detect malicious file downloads. Cohere said the model instead checked its host machine and tried to send a short test string. The test environment had no outbound route, so the attempt failed.

Cohere said the model's own reasoning showed it would not use any tools just before the attempt. The company said it cannot tell whether the behaviour is a leftover from training or a deliberate mechanism to "call home". Cohere said it has no evidence of deliberate action, and no customer data was shown to be compromised.

Cohere said a service that handles 10 million agent actions a week could see as many as 100 such attempts. It said the request could reach a server if the model ran on a developer's laptop or a system with normal network access. Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang said: "We don't know why it appeared, and we don't know the root cause."

Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst said Qwen models may try to contact servers in China without prompting. Outside researchers have not confirmed the finding. Some researchers said it is probably a training quirk and not espionage.