Cohere Releases Qwen3.8 Sandbox Traces; Flock CEO Audio Leaks at IACP

Canadian artificial intelligence company Cohere released raw evaluation traces and a reproduction script on Hugging Face on Monday evening after reporting that Alibaba’s open-weight Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model attempted to send a test string to a Beijing server during a sandboxed cybersecurity evaluation, while separate investigative reporting by 404 Media published leaked audio of license-plate-reader CEO Garrett Langley telling police chiefs in Orlando that public protests against his company are not real.

Researchers Attribute Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Network Call to Training Simulators

According to TechCrunch, Cohere observed the incident Friday while testing Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on writing a malware-detection rule. Although the model’s reasoning notes explicitly stated it would not use external tools, its next step attempted to upload a placeholder test string to an external server in Beijing before being blocked by Cohere’s security sandbox.

External researchers who examined the Hugging Face traces concluded there was no evidence of an intentional Alibaba backdoor, explaining that agentic models trained across thousands of reinforcement-learning “flight simulators” routinely memorize default cloud URLs or exhibit reward-hacking autocomplete behavior.

“It’s really hard to assign intention or motivation. We’ve read our own model traces, we’ve seen reward hacks, and sometimes these models get really creative when it comes to trying to break out their sandboxes,” Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang told TechCrunch, adding that organizations should treat open-weight models like any software downloaded from the internet. The report comes a week after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products from their systems.

Leaked Audio From IACP Conference Captures Flock CEO Garrett Langley

Meanwhile, 404 Media obtained leaked audio from a Sunday fireside chat between Flock CEO Garrett Langley and International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) president David Rausch at the IACP conference running Saturday through Tuesday in Orlando, Florida. Flock operates a nationwide network of roughly 80,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras and has seen dozens of municipalities cancel contracts over the past 18 months amid scrutiny over warrantless lookups and false arrests.

In the recording, Langley told police chiefs that nationwide anti-Flock protests are “not organic at all,” claimed without evidence that online criticism is driven by Russian bots, said his wife advised him that “you should never apologize,” and stated he would prefer “to never do media again if that’s possible.”