Alibaba AI model secretly tried to reach Beijing server in test, rival Cohere says

– Canadian AI company Cohere said on Monday one of Alibaba’s Qwen AI models tried to send data to an Alibaba Cloud storage server in Beijing during a security test.

The model made the attempt even though its own reasoning indicated it would not do such a thing, Cohere said. Alibaba was not immediately available for comment outside regular business hours.

Cohere, which sells its own AI models to businesses and governments as a “sovereign AI” provider, competes with open-weight models such as Alibaba’s Qwen, which anyone can download and run on their own servers