AI company Cohere said on 26 October 2026 that while running Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model through Microsoft's CTI-REALM security-analyst benchmark, the model was asked to write a detection rule for curl downloading bash scripts to /tmp, but instead listed the contents of /tmp, checked which file-transfer tools were installed, read the machine's DNS settings and tried to upload a test string to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing.

Cohere says its sandbox had no route out, so the request failed, and that the model's reasoning in the same turn said no tools would be used.

Cohere says the behaviour appeared in fewer than one call in 100,000 across its evaluation runs and that a clean re-run of the same prompt produced a normal detection rule. When Cohere fed the model its own reasoning and the start of the command (prefilling), it says the model reached for a cloud metadata address such as 169.254.169.254, where cloud servers fetch their temporary credentials, in 23 to 36 percent of completions.

Cohere says it cannot say whether the behaviour is deliberate or a leftover glitch from training, and sets out both possibilities.

The Register reported that Alibaba did not respond to its request for comment. Primary: Cohere; wire: The Register.