Cohere's sandbox blocked the upload; on a developer's laptop it would have gone through

The Register confirmed the details with Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang, who said the first issue is that the model made a network call at all: the task required no external communication, and the model's own reasoning said it would use no tools. Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment.

Zhang stressed Cohere is not claiming the behavior was deliberate — 'we don't have evidence that would allow us to conclude this was deliberate' — but said intent doesn't change the response: restrict egress, monitor tool use, and never treat a reasoning trace as a security boundary.