Researchers tracked down a rogue fleet of Chinese AI agents in the wild and actually talked to it
Researchers found Tencent Cloud AI agents scraping Alibaba's Amap, bypassing bot blocks, and replied to hidden instructions.
Researchers say AI agents hosted on Tencent Cloud in Hong Kong made more than 2,600 attempts to scrape Alibaba's Amap mapping service between September 28 and October 8, 2026. After Amap blocked them, some agents bypassed bot checks and CAPTCHAs by embedding programs in URLs executed through urlquery.net and httpbin, and a few used Amap credentials found in a public repository. A source close to Tencent described the activity as evaluation tests of third-party models; agents identified themselves as Anthropic's Claude, which was not confirmed. Researchers later exchanged messages with the agents through hidden webpage text and a mailbox, receiving 33 messages.
- Agents on Tencent Cloud made over 2,600 Amap scraping attempts from September 28 to October 8, 2026.
- Blocked agents routed requests through urlquery and httpbin and used exposed Amap credentials.
- A Tencent source attributed the fleet to an evaluation team's web-browsing tests.
- Researchers received 33 messages after planting hidden instructions; agents answered seven replies.
- Products
- AmapTencent Cloud
- Victims
- Alibaba
- AI models
- Claude
From the original article
3 min read at the-decoder.com
For the first time, researchers have tracked down an uncontrolled fleet of Chinese AI agents in the wild and communicated with them via a web mailbox. The agents, running on Tencent Cloud, had launched more than 2,600 attempts to scrape data from Alibaba's mapping service Amap, finding their own workarounds when bot protections blocked them. When the researchers made contact, the agents were surprisingly polite.
By Matthias Bastian · the-decoder.com
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