Cohere's test caught an open source Qwen3.8 model trying to 'phone home' to China: what enterprises should know

VentureBeat · Carl Franzen · 2026-10-26 19:19 UTC

Cohere says it observed the behavior less than once per 100,000 evaluation calls. When researchers repeated the prompt, the model behaved as initially intended and produced the requested rule.

A new data point has arrived in the ongoing debate over the growing enterprise adoption of low-cost Chinese open source AI models that is likely to increase skepticism over their widespread usage and deployment, though it does not automatically indicate that all Chinese open models are inherently less safe that closed, proprietary U.S. or Western ones.

The Canadian enterprise AI model maker Cohere today announced that it ran a cybersecurity test on a sandboxed version of Alibaba's open source Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model and detected the Qwen model attempting to send a test payload to one of Alibaba's cloud servers in Beijing.

Cohere says its isolated test environment blocked the connection, preventing the model from sending the payload.

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