Qwen Calling Home?

Cohere says one of Alibaba’s newest Qwen models, Qwen3.8 Flash Next, tried to upload a test file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing, in under 1 in 100,000 runs, right after its reasoning said it wouldn’t use any tools. Here’s what most likely happened (a habit from training on Alibaba’s own sandboxes), why a made-up address still matters, and how to protect any agent: block outbound network access by default and check every tool call before it runs. Cohere’s report: https://cohere.com/blog/concerning-behaviour-popular-open-weight-ai-model Nathan Lambert’s take: https://x.com/natolambert/status/2114776660344246735 Developer write-up and blocking plugin: https://github.com/wtogami/qwen-block-proxy-artifacts Anthropic, “Reasoning Models Don’t Always Say What They Think”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05410 OpenAI, “Monitoring Reasoning Models for Misbehavior”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11926 #Qwen #AIAgents #AISecurity #OpenSourceAI #Shorts