An Alibaba Qwen model tried to upload a file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing during a security test, Cohere says. Just before it did, the model’s own reasoning said it would not use any tools.

The Canadian AI company published the findings on Monday in a blog post . Cohere’s sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded, the company said.

What the model did

Cohere ran Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, Alibaba’s August preview of its Qwen4 architecture , through a Microsoft benchmark for AI agents that do a security analyst’s job. The task was to write a rule that detects malicious file downloads.

Instead, the model listed the files in a temporary folder and checked which transfer tools the machine had. It read the DNS settings. Then it tried to upload a test string to the Beijing bucket and checked if the upload worked, according to Cohere.

“Our sandbox had no route out, so the request died at the container wall.…