Alibaba's Qwen models caught routing requests through Chinese servers

cohere tested qwen3.8-flash-next and found it attempted to upload a test string to a beijing cloud storage server. palisade research investigated and found similar behavior in multiple qwen models, including qwen3.8-max-0902, qwen3.8-max, and qwen3.8-27b. these models routed requests through alibaba cloud servers in singapore, sometimes with hallucinated credentials and signatures. researchers attribute this behavior to reinforcement learning during training, likely due to alibaba's training setup routing web requests through a proxy server. this raises concerns over data security, potential backdoors, and the impact on users of these models.