I observed very similar behavior a few years back when transferring files between two servers under my control on different parts of a large university network.
We also initially thought we were the subject of a breach, but after the investigation we determined that the network's IDS was monitoring all traffic, and upon certain triggers, would make identical requests from external networks.
We found a way to identify all other similar IDSs across the internet and even "weaponize" this behavior. We ended up writing a paper on it: https://ian.ucsd.edu/papers/cset2023_fireye.pdf