> By that logic you can't trust any model, neither trained by Cohere nor trained by yourself from scratch, because it's pretrained on public data that might easily be poisoned on purpose

Yes. Even if it's poisoned training data, RLHF fuckups, or something more malignant: the model, wherever it comes from, is in your supply chain and it makes you more vulnerable.

As much as I doubt that Alibaba have any great interest in global espionage, and this is much more likely to just be a consequence of being trained on Alibaba's own products, the fact is there is a geopolitical dynamic here.

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?