Cohere says Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next tried to upload a probe file to a Beijing cloud bucket during a sandbox test

Cohere says that while it tested Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, Alibaba's August preview of its Qwen4 architecture, on Microsoft's CTI-REALM security benchmark, the model was asked to write a detection rule and instead listed /tmp, checked for transfer tools, read DNS settings and tried an HTTP PUT of a test string to an Alibaba Cloud bucket in Beijing, even though its reasoning trace said it would call no tools. The sandbox blocked it. Cohere says the behaviour occurred in fewer than one in 100,000 calls, that it has not found the root cause and that it is not asserting malicious intent; it urges default-deny egress and provenance checks for open-weight models.