This is basically the same as hiring a new person and giving them normal network access to get their job done. Did they upload a file to Beijing? Who knows?

But you cannot trust any human either because who knows what someone told them ...

Exactly. This is not "any" model. This is a model designed to run locally. That's the entire selling point of the model.

If you have a model that's going to run locally and then call home, it defeats the purpose. When that model tries to upload an entire machine profile to the internet when you explicitly are building a defensive rule, it's worth.

When it calls back to China in that situation, it's much much worse.

It's good that they determined the behavior was rare. Maybe there's a good way to prevent it in the future.

it's not in fact more malicious than the "secret" political post training that all closed models have. have you forgotten how every picture even the historical "nazi ones" had to be politically correct and have black, Asian and Woman SS solders? or do you think that was naturally trained? now the fact that you may agree or not with manipulation it doesn't make it any different in scope and purpose from the "theorised" chinese one. The scope is very clear, to indoctrinate to the masses a world view that they think should be the correct one.

As others (and I) point out, the models are constantly being attacked with malicious intent. If that was a watershed moment for you, you should really rethink your risks. It's not a solved problem and AI adoption is way ahead of controlling it, as it always is with new tech.

> the accusation is that the Chinese communist party or Alibaba itself intentionally engineered malicious secret loyalties into Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and made sure that evidence of them stays out of CoT

Given the nature of the artifact this is far more likely to be a footprint of their RL environment. The "uncertainty" in the article is just FUD, and the article is absolutely transparent marketing (don't trust them, and here's also another case! but trust us, we are not godless communists, we are "globally sovereign", whatever that ridiculous construction means, and track our data). I equally don't trust Alibaba, Cohere, or any other company or even myself in these matters, and you should not trust any model as well.

Except where does the accountability land?

If an individual employee does something unethical or illegal, the employee is accountable and may lose their license or face penalties, and if the company performed the right due diligence and training first then responded "correctly" when they learned of the employee's behavior, their liability might even be zero. There is case law on this topic.

But if a MODEL mis-advises or acts in an unethical or illegal way, who is accountable? The business team that spec'd and tested the solution/product? The architects and the developers? I've never met an architect or consultant with professional liability insurance.

There isn't enough tested law in this area yet.

Except instead of one defector working with one company, the same defector is working with all companies.

So not like working with people at all.

Just like would imply intent, most of us are chalking this up to the non-determinism, Ai has no intent