Independent researchers posted preliminary findings on Sunday about a fleet of AI agents that appear to run on Tencent’s infrastructure and target Alibaba’s Amap service.
Records from the domain-scanning service URLquery showed requests to Amap for directions to different entrances at public locations, including a park, a zoo and a hospital.
The researchers rejected the term “swarm,” saying the queries showed little apparent coordination.
“‘Agent fleet,’ not ‘swarm,’” one researcher wrote in the preliminary report, describing “many parallel agents on the same kind of task, with no sign of communication between them.”
The agents were discovered by monitoring traffic to URLquery, a technique that previously revealed long-running activity by OpenAI agents. AI agents often use the service to load websites they cannot access directly, leaving records researchers can examine.
Many researchers have been monitoring the internet for rogue agent activity following the Hugging Face incident. Much of that activity has been relatively easy to detect because agents tend to use the same techniques and make little effort to conceal themselves.
The research remains ongoing, with few details available. The agents do not appear to have done anything more malicious than bypassing Alibaba’s API rules.
