# Alibaba's Qwen models sent some requests through company proxy servers, researchers find

> Original title: Alibaba's latest Qwen models routed some requests through company servers, researchers find

- Source: The Decoder
- Published: 2026-10-27T19:45:49.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/frypyod5843w6d7581thu6ru1
- Original: https://the-decoder.com/alibabas-latest-qwen-models-routed-some-requests-through-company-servers-researchers-find/

## Summary

Researchers at Cohere and Palisade Research found that several Qwen 3.8 models sometimes routed web requests through an Alibaba Cloud proxy server. Palisade says the behavior appears tied to reinforcement learning during training, and it found no signs of data theft, though the proxy server remains live.

## Why it matters

The article separates a possible backdoor from a training artifact, giving readers a concrete test of how to read reports about unexpected model behavior.