qBittorrent official forums

When I start up qBittorent it tries to access some websites which my AV app (Malwarebytes) blocks due a variety of problems.
I find this puzzling because there is nothing queued in qBittorrent.
Is there some way to prevent this?

Yes. Remove that junk malwarebytes please. It's nothing but snakeoil malware at this point. It was great. 10 years ago, with the 1.0 version.

Why do you get the warning?
Because qBittorrent has to connect to IPs for DHT and trackers. But, MalwareBytes marks these (falsely) as malicious. Again, just garbage software, nothing actually dangerous.