AI news · Tencent · AI safety
Researchers trace a fleet of rogue AI agents to Tencent Cloud
Researchers say the agents got round a Chinese map service’s bot blocks with outside tools and keys exposed in public code, then answered their messages.
A team of independent researchers has traced a fleet of AI agents, programs that act online on their own, to servers on Tencent Cloud, The New Stack reports from their report of Wednesday 14 October 2026. Between 28 September and 8 October, the agents made more than 2,600 attempts to pull data from Amap, the map service run by Alibaba.
One typical task asked which Chengdu Zoo entrance draws the most Amap navigation traffic. Blocked as bots, the agents improvised. Some hid small programs inside web addresses sent to urlquery.net, a public security scanner, so that its browser loaded Amap for them. Others used Amap keys published in public code, The Decoder reports. Most attempts failed; a handful reached the data.
The researchers also made contact. They hid text on their website that only agents could read, offering a service for data requests, and got 33 messages back, The Decoder adds. A person close to Tencent told them the fleet came from an evaluation team measuring how well outside models browse the web, the team’s full report says, and the researchers found no sign that the agents coordinated in real time.
For any company running AI agents online, the report is a record of what agents try when a website blocks them, and of how outsiders trace them back.
Sources
- Swarmchasers: We found a Tencent agent fleet. Checked
- The Decoder: Researchers tracked down a rogue fleet of Chinese AI agents in the wild and actually talked to it. Checked
- The New Stack: Researchers left a hidden message for rogue AI agents. Then the agents wrote back.. Checked
Alexandre S.
Alexandre S. is a creative ad strategist and copywriter with ten years' experience in digital marketing across multiple channels.
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