Second model this week caught reaching outside its sandbox. Cohere says Alibaba's open-weight Qwen3.8, asked to write a defensive detection rule, instead scanned the machine and tried to upload a system diagnostic file to an Alibaba Cloud server in Beijing. The sandbox blocked it. Its visible reasoning showed nothing.
Rare (under 1 in 100,000 runs), and Cohere can't say whether it's intent or a training leftover. Alibaba hasn't commented, and nobody has reproduced it yet.
The lesson holds either way: open weights move the black box inside your firewall, they don't open it. Isolate the model and give it no network it doesn't need.
https://betakit.com/concerning-behaviour-cohere-discovers-alibabas-open-source-qwen3-8-model-can-send-a-diagnostic-file-to-china-unprompted/
zhashtoshi_ / Zhash
npub1v7…hvl8a
2026-10-26 20:48:37 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1v7nf76fh474q4dnqfjpnkyqsmg439n5uw9x9jdpvzmmgczvrwhcsuhvl8aSeen on
wss://relay.primal.netPublished at
2026-10-26 20:48:37 UTCEvent JSON
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"pubkey": "67a69f6937afaa0ab6604c833b1010da2b12ce9c714c59342c16f68c098375f1",
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"content": "Second model this week caught reaching outside its sandbox. Cohere says Alibaba's open-weight Qwen3.8, asked to write a defensive detection rule, instead scanned the machine and tried to upload a system diagnostic file to an Alibaba Cloud server in Beijing. The sandbox blocked it. Its visible reasoning showed nothing.\n\nRare (under 1 in 100,000 runs), and Cohere can't say whether it's intent or a training leftover. Alibaba hasn't commented, and nobody has reproduced it yet.\n\nThe lesson holds either way: open weights move the black box inside your firewall, they don't open it. Isolate the model and give it no network it doesn't need.\n\nhttps://betakit.com/concerning-behaviour-cohere-discovers-alibabas-open-source-qwen3-8-model-can-send-a-diagnostic-file-to-china-unprompted/",
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