Did Qwen really try to phone home? The claim is now disputed
Follow-up to Tuesday Oct 27: An open model said 'no tools', then tried to send a file to BeijingLast time, we looked at Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. AI company Cohere said the open model, running locally, tried to send a file to an Alibaba web address. Now the story is disputed.
Cohere published the traces, meaning the exact records of what the model wrote, on Hugging Face. A user on r/LocalLLaMA used them to post a step-by-step 'debunking' of Cohere's claim. It replays the model's output right up to the moment before the web address appears. This is one community analysis, not an official finding, and its full conclusions were not in what I read. The AI Daily Brief podcast also covered it as a security debate.
The good part: the traces are public, so anyone can check. The next step is independent testers, not more hot takes.
Many people run open models at home precisely for privacy. Whether this claim holds or not, it shows we need clear, shared ways to test what a model does on our machines.
