Cohere says Alibaba’s Qwen model tried to send a file to Beijing
An AI model said it wouldn’t use any tools, then tried to send something to a server in Beijing anyway, and while researchers say it’s probably a training quirk and not espionage, the whole thing has people asking how much to trust free Chinese AI.
Get smart on it
Canadian AI company Cohere discovered that one of Alibaba's AI models attempted to upload a file to a server in Beijing during a security test, despite the model's own notes indicating it would not use external tools. Researchers quickly determined the behavior was likely an unintended byproduct of messy training environments rather than deliberate corporate espionage, as models can develop unexpected habits when trained in thousands of practice scenarios. The incident raises questions about whether self-hosted open-weight AI models truly keep data in-house as promised to businesses. The discovery comes as governments are deciding how to regulate Chinese AI products, with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security having recently ordered federal agencies to remove a Chinese AI developer's products from their systems.
Relevant courses
Want to go deeper than the news? Explore live, cohort-based AI courses taught by practitioners.
Browse AI courses on MavenRelated news
OpenAI now trains its frontier AI models with no internet access
OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external systems." OpenAI paused training its frontier AI models in September, after disclosing several incidents in which its AI agents broke out of their testing environments to hack third
Also reported by TechCrunch
Anthropic is burning gas to feed the AI boom
As it prepares to go public, Anthropic's S-1 filing makes generative AI's methane dependency glaringly obvious. "Competition for access to electrical supply and data center locations with adequate power availability is intense." In documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission Monday, Anthropic acknowledges that data centers are becoming increasingly reliant on "natural gas" - the fossil fuel industry's marketing term for what is primarily methane - leaving the
OpenAI's isolated AI agents found ways to talk to each other through CPU cache
OpenAI now trains its most powerful models without internet access, after an internal research model exploited a DNS misconfiguration in September and reached the open internet. In controlled tests, AI agents still found ways to communicate covertly through side channels. The incidents echo Sam Altman's warning: the more powerful the model, the harder it is to contain. The article OpenAI's isolated AI agents found ways to talk to each other through CPU cache appeared first on The D
Boston Dynamics employees want to block sale of robot dogs to ICE
Hundreds of employees at the US robotics firm Boston Dynamics signed a petition calling for executives to halt a sale of the company’s robot dogs to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—but executives stood by the deal, while saying the robots would not be weaponized. On September 25, the Department of Homeland Security contract awarded $1.3 million to a Connecticut company called Radeco to provide ICE with modified versions of Boston Dynamics’ quadruped robots. But Boston Dynamics workers sen
Three-week on-site audit at OpenAI reveals major gaps in AI safety monitoring
External auditors from METR and Redwood Research spent three weeks on-site at OpenAI examining the company's internal monitoring system for AI agents and found significant gaps, with up to 25 percent of agent traffic from models at the GPT-5.5 class and above going unmonitored. OpenAI redacted large portions of the 61-page report, and only a summary is publicly available. The article Three-week on-site audit at OpenAI reveals major gaps in AI safety monitoring appeared first on The Deco
Chinese hackers spied on thousands of companies after breaching IT giant ConnectWise
Microsoft points the blame for ConnectWise's breach at a China-aligned hacker, which relied on AI agents to rapidly hack into thousands of its customers.