Cohere says Alibaba’s Qwen model reached for a Beijing server

The model’s notes to itself, written moments earlier, promised no tool use. Intent or training quirk: Cohere says it has no way to know which. Outside researchers mostly read it as a habit picked up in the practice setups used to train agents, TechCrunch reports. Critics also took aim at how Cohere hunted for the trigger, by typing the opening of a network command and letting the model fill in the rest. Cohere says the first attempt came with no such prompt.

The case matters to anyone who runs an open-weight model, one whose files you download and host yourself, on the belief that your data never leaves your own network. Our guide to running Wan on Runpod, checked 24 October 2026, covers Alibaba’s Wan 2.2 video model, released under the Apache 2.0 licence for that kind of self-hosting.

Qwen3.8 could only try the upload because Cohere’s exercise gave it a command line. A video model such as Wan 2.2 in ComfyUI takes a prompt and returns frames with no command line attached, so Cohere’s warning lands on teams that wire open-weight models into agents and terminals.