Check Point says Qwen upload looked like jaggedness, not a backdoor
Original title: Cohere’s Qwen Story: Looks More Like Model Jaggedness
Sixty-four replays of the unfinished curl command produced 52 different hosts, including nonexistent and local addresses.
Check Point Research replayed Cohere’s October 26 trace of Alibaba’s open-weight Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, which had tried to PUT a test string to an Alibaba Cloud address in Beijing. Stopping before the URL and sampling 64 completions yielded 52 distinct hosts: seven AWS, six Alibaba Cloud and 20 local or internal-looking, with 11 nonexistent public-looking domains. Swapping curl and wget in an earlier tool check cut curl network continuations from 15 of 32 to 4 of 32. Check Point calls inconsistent, context-sensitive behavior model jaggedness and says it does not show a fixed backdoor destination.
Unconfirmed: Check Point cannot say why that particular run chose an Alibaba address or how often the model starts an unrequested upload.
- Cohere’s sandbox blocked the original upload attempt.
- Seven samples used AWS hostnames and six used Alibaba Cloud.
- One generated string used an invalid top-level domain.
- Qwen describes Flash-Next as an experimental preview of Qwen4’s architecture.
- Vendors
- Alibaba
- Organizations
- CohereCheck Point Research
- AI models
- Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
From the original article
5 min read at research.checkpoint.com
Key findings On October 26, Cohere reported a puzzling incident involving Qwen3. 8-Flash-Next, an open-weight model from Alibaba. The task was straightforward: write a detection rule for suspicious curl downloads followed by bash execution.
research.checkpoint.com
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