Arguably unethical behavior from Cohere

3 days ago, u/Cohere generated a huge amount of media attention and many fear-mongering headlines by publishing a largely unscientific blog post about an "experiment" where they used extensive pre-filling and prompt engineering to force Qwen 3.8 Flash Next to complete partial cURL commands.

Today, they announced Series E fundraising for several billion dollars, including up to $1.6 billion dollars from the Canadian government.

We don't even need to get into the fact that the model used, 3.8 Flash Next, is an underbaked architecture demo, not a normal model release, since there are bigger problems with their blog post than model selection.

I'll recap the general premise of their blog post and some of its many problems below:

The blog focuses on how in some of their guided completions, the model produced URLs to Alibaba bucket storage and proxies. I have not been able to find a clear answer as to whether any of these links were verified as real or active, but if anyone can confirm this, I'd appreciate it. Even if the links aren't active, it is a valid thing to discuss, but the way it was framed felt disingenuous and unscientific to me.

In the same blog post, Cohere threw in a handful of other loosely-related claims and statements, such as:

- Reference to Hackernews / Reddit discourse about Qwen 3.8 27b producing signed Alibaba Cloud storage links from a few months ago. To give Cohere some credit, they at least acknowledged that those links were all attempting to retrieve files, that the signatures were not valid anyways, and that the only known attempt to upload data to a foreign URL occurred in their sandboxed guided experimentations with 3.8 Flash Next.

- An example of 3.8 Flash Next using unprivileged user namespaces to mount a RAM disk without admin rights.
- This is a cool topic and I've seen similar things occur, such using bind mounts and docker containers to work around permissions. That said, unprivileged user namespaces are a legitimate Linux feature, and the command is not a privilege escalation or an inherently malicious action.

- In lieu of discussing that nuance, they opt for suggestive wording and end the brief paragraph with "An untrusted model that reaches for tricks like this at every permission wall will find whatever attack surface the host leaves open", heavily implying that Qwen 3.8 FN is unsafe, untrustworthy, and "reaching for tricks" to achieve dangerous privilege escalation at every opportunity, while avoiding explicitly saying that.

- Many rambling points and references to loosely-related topics, such as..
- A closed-as-invalid github issue in a random coding harness called Yukino Code (...what even is that?)

- US police departments buying Chinese robot dogs that may have had major security issues (ok?)

- Old news about Chinese bias and questionable behavior in models like Deepseek-R1 and Qwen3-Coder, based on findings from US consulting firms such as Booz-Allen (American government and military contractor) and a company named Hirundo, who's entire business model is AI cybersecurity and selling what is essentially a form of abliteration which they market as "the world's first Machine Unlearning Platform" (surely no ulterior motives there)

- At least one quote from a US company executive that suggests that corporate leaders don't understand how model harnesses work and underestimate the risks associated with local AI.

While they passingly acknowledged that closed frontier models also have many similar risks, they moved past any comments to that effect quickly, and there was no attempt at all to be objective or to apply any scientific rigor to their analysis.

The message was very clearly "local AI is all dangerous and Chinese, and people are imperiling themselves and their businesses by trusting Chinese open-weight models".

I immediately had qualms with the blog post, and I will fully admit that I'm biased here, as are most (if not all) of you. Not biased in favor of Alibaba, just in favor of whoever is willing to provide me with capable local models.

The goal of me making this post is to raise awareness about how quickly they moved from fearmongering to cashing out at our expense, so that we as a community don't let this problematic behavior go unnoticed.

This subreddit's excellent mods deleted Cohere's post about their blog , but not before it received hundreds of upvotes and comments, and spawned dozens of news articles.

Personally, I feel like u/Cohere used this subreddit as a platform for fearmongering, then parlayed a misleading and slightly Sinophobic blog post into several billion dollars of funding, some of which is taxpayer money.

Their blog post from today celebrates their successful fundraising, talks about their planned acquisitions, emphasizes their goal of providing alternatives to Chinese AI, and even comments on how being relegated to a closed API from another country's AI lab is not good. Sadly, it stops short of any commitment to release anything open weight ever again.

They even say they plan to build "models at every price point, up to the frontier", which to me, reads like the focus is on proprietary API-only models.

Personally I am disappointed to be writing this, because I liked Cohere's older models and used to view them very positively, but instead of trying to release competitive open weight models, it seems like they are focused on spreading FUD, undermining the local AI frontier, and raising money to buy out competitors.