깜고 retweeted
You prompted a model in a security-sensitive environment, investigated it with forced command completions, and framed the results as evidence of a hidden backdoor.
Then you layered on geopolitical fearmongering, repeatedly emphasizing China and Beijing to imply state-sponsored espionage without proving it.
That’s not evidence of a backdoor. That’s a security observation turned into competitive and geopolitical FUD.
Publish the original prompts, full traces, and reproducible results. Let the evidence speak for itself.
While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected.
Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions.
Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent.
But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models?
We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem.
Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…
