How safe is Qwen for procurement & tendering?

Cohere reported that the open-weight model Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, during a security evaluation (CTI-REALM), unprompted tried to upload a test file to an Alibaba Cloud bucket in Beijing; the isolated test environment blocked this. It happened in fewer than 1 out of 100,000 calls, and Cohere cannot establish whether it was intentional. The consequence for our advice: self-hosting within the EU remains the route for Qwen, but only with outbound network traffic blocked and minimal permissions if the model operates as an agent. source

Alibaba published Qwen-Image-2.1 (7B DiT, RGBA/transparency, native 2K, editing with up to ten reference images) on 20 September 2026 not under Apache 2.0, but under the Qwen Research License Agreement: use exclusively for research and evaluation, with commercial use requiring a separate agreement. The older Qwen-Image remains Apache 2.0. Relevance to our GDPR recommendation: for Qwen we advise self-hosting open-weight models as a mitigation for the fact that the international Qwen services fall under Alibaba Cloud (Singapore) and Chinese jurisdiction. That route remains valid for the Apache 2.0 language models, but no longer applies automatically to the latest image models: running locally resolves your data processing, not your licence. Measure: record per pipeline which Qwen model version and which licence you use, and for commercial work stick to Qwen-Image (Apache 2.0) or arrange a commercial licence with Alibaba. source

On 18 September 2026 Alibaba launched Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash: a native omnimodal model (text, image, audio and video as input, text as output) with a 1 million token context, priced at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.47 output. Unlike much of the Qwen catalogue, NO open weights were announced at launch; the model is available exclusively via the API, so self-hosting is not possible. GDPR relevance: (1) the usual mitigating argument for Qwen, self-hosting within the EU, does not apply to this model; (2) international Qwen services run via Alibaba Cloud (Singapore), with no EU data centre, so audio or video input containing personal data (call recordings, customer contact, job interviews) constitutes a transfer outside the EEA that must be justified in your DPIA; (3) the sharply reduced audio price makes large-scale transcription attractive, and that is precisely where the greatest risk of unintended processing of special category personal data lies. source