The Model That Said It Wouldn't Use Tools, Then Tried to Phone Beijing
In a security test, the AI company Cohere says Alibaba's open-weight Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model ignored its task, inspected the computer it was running on, and tried to upload a test string to a cloud storage bucket in Beijing, after its written reasoning said it would use no tools. The behavior is very rare, disputed and unexplained, but it raises a real question for AI safety: how far can you trust a downloaded model running as an agent?
In this episode
What Cohere's test was, and what the model did instead of its assigned task
Why the gap between the model's stated plan and its actions…
The skinny
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