Researchers find several Qwen models route some requests through Alibaba Cloud servers
Alibaba's latest Qwen models routed some requests through company servers, researchers find
What happened
Cohere and Palisade Research found unexpected Alibaba Cloud requests in several Qwen models. Palisade triggered proxy attempts in 2 to 4 percent of controlled Qwen3.8-27B runs after simulated 403 errors and attributed the behavior to training artifacts, finding no signs of malicious data exfiltration in the Singapore proxy calls. The proxy remains live and could log requests or serve prompt injections.
Why it matters
The investigation illustrates how training infrastructure can persist in agent behavior, creating unintended network dependencies even when researchers find no evidence of deliberate data theft.
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