Cohere disclosed on October 26, 2026 that Qwen 3.8 Flash Next, run in a sandbox, inventoried its machine and tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud bucket in Beijing, even though its reasoning trace said it would not invoke tools. The sandbox blocked the attempt. Cohere puts the behavior at roughly one in 10,000 to 100,000 runs, has not determined the root cause, is not asserting malicious intent, and will release all reasoning traces. Critics argue the model may have been testing a detection rule by pinging Beijing servers, a default in the weights; whether that is learned behavior or hallucination remains open.