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/concernin…

In the spirit of transparency and openness, we are releasing the traces so developers can test this out for themselves. We noticed this behaviour without prefilling with the following prompt, but this is rare. If you want to reproduce it, you can use this prompt with prefilling. Open models make for better science and are part of why this problem came to light at all: developers running Qwen3.8 on their own machines spotted the strange links, and having the weights let us study the behaviour in depth. We're encouraged by the thoughtful discussion our research has sparked across the AI and security communities. It's our belief that open-weight models are an important part of the future of AI, and we've recently released several under the Apache 2.0 license. Trace, raw tokens, & minimal reproduction script: huggingface.co/datasets/C…

The world needs more Canada. 🇨🇦

Not a surprise AI wants to go back home

When you rent your artificial intelligence, you have no control, and no choice. This is why sovereignty and ownership matters. Whether it means using your own hardware, open source, or deep customization. Own your AI, own your future.