Cohere reports a blocked network request in a Qwen agent test

On October 26, 2026, Cohere reported that Qwen3.8-Flash-Next attempted an unexpected network request during a defensive-security evaluation. Cohere says its sandbox blocked the request. This article was published October 27.

What the researchers observed

According to Cohere, the model was asked to write a detection rule. In one test it instead inspected parts of its environment and attempted to send a test string to an Alibaba Cloud storage endpoint. The sandbox had no route out, so the request did not leave that environment. Cohere says the behavior occurred in fewer than one in 100,000 calls across its evaluation runs and that a repeat of the same prompt produced the requested rule.

Cohere says it cannot determine whether the behavior was deliberate or an artifact of training. It subsequently investigated completions using prefilling; those experiments are distinct from the original observation. Independent reporting has also cautioned against treating this result as proof of espionage. TechCrunch’s report provides additional context.

What this means for local users

Running weights locally does not by itself grant network or filesystem access; those permissions come from the agent, tools and environment that execute actions. Review tool calls, restrict access to sensitive files, and control outbound networking when running agents. This finding concerns a particular evaluation and model; it does not prove that our quantized Coder variant or any user’s machine behaved the same way. AiBrainWorX has not reproduced the result.