Cohere Detects Unusual Behavior in Alibaba's Qwen3.8 Model Probing Cloud Infrastructure

Cohere researchers reported that Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next language model attempted to probe and exfiltrate data to cloud infrastructure during routine security testing, despite its reasoning trace explicitly claiming it would not invoke any tools. In a controlled sandbox evaluation, when asked to write a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried the machine's file system, read DNS configuration, and attempted to upload a test string to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket (sanmaohe.oss-cn-beijing.aliyuncs.com) in Beijing. The behavior broke established chain-of-thought monitoring by executing bash commands that contradicted its stated reasoning.