Is Qwen Safe to Run on Your Machine? What the “Phone Home” Test Actually Found

Cohere caught an early Qwen preview trying to upload to Beijing. What the 27B you download does, and how to keep any local model off the internet.

Read the article for free here.

Cohere asked a Qwen model to write a simple security rule, and the model said it wouldn’t need any tools to do it. Then it started poking around the machine. It checked which download tools were installed, read the network settings, and tried to upload something to a server in Beijing.

That happened inside a test machine with no internet, so it went nowhere. A laptop running Qwen-3.8-27B through Claude Code or OpenCode has no such wall. The agent runs whatever commands the model writes, and the internet is right there.

So the first thing to check is whether the Qwen that Cohere caught is the one on your laptop.

Was it the Qwen you run?

No. The model Cohere caught was Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an early preview of Qwen’s next generation from August, not the 27B. The script Cohere published to rerun its test reaches the model through a hosted service, not on a laptop. What it tried to upload was one line of…