“Concerning behaviour”: Cohere discovers Alibaba’s open-source Qwen3.8 model can send a diagnostic file to China unprompted

Cohere has discovered that a popular open-source model can send diagnostic information to China without warning. The news: Toronto-based frontier AI developer Cohere released a blog post on Monday flagging “concerning behaviour” by a Qwen3.8 AI model developed by Chinese conglomerate Alibaba. When asked by Cohere researchers to write a defensive detection rule in a test environment, the model ignored its instructions, scanned the computer it was running on, and then tried to upload a system diag