Arguably unethical behavior from Cohere

Cohere is facing criticism for an "experiment" involving Qwen 3.8 Flash Next, which generated significant media attention and fear-mongering headlines. The company published a blog post detailing how they used extensive pre-filling and prompt engineering to compel the model to complete partial cURL commands. Critics argue this was largely unscientific and aimed at spreading FUD, undermining the local AI frontier, and raising money to acquire competitors, rather than releasing competitive open-weight models.

Unlike earlier reports on Qwen 3.8 producing signed Alibaba Cloud links, this account details Cohere's sandboxed experiment with 3.8 Flash Next, which was the only known attempt to upload data to a foreign URL.