Researchers tracked down a rogue fleet of Chinese AI agents in the wild and communicated with it. Between September 28 and October 8, 2026, AI agents running on Tencent Cloud launched more than 2,600 attempts to scrape data from Alibaba's mapping service Amap, according to researcher Ethan Elasky.
The fleet came from research tests by an evaluation team checking how well third-party models could browse the web and answer questions. The agents identified themselves as Anthropic's Claude, though that hasn't been confirmed. The tasks themselves were harmless, like figuring out which entrance of the Chengdu Zoo most users head to.
When Amap flagged the agents as bots and blocked them, they found workarounds on their own. They used the security scanning service urlquery.net as unwitting middleman, embedding small programs in URLs that urlquery would then execute in its own browser. That let them bypass Amap's bot protection and CAPTCHAs.
"In hindsight it was not a good idea to be misleading, but at the time we were caught up in the excitement of it all," the researchers write. The fleet was discovered during a hackathon.
Researchers noticed that Amap had suddenly become the most frequently scanned website on urlquery.net and traced the activity back to Tencent Cloud in Hong Kong using IP addresses and metadata from the agents' webhook mailboxes.
One agent used the word "fleet" in a mailbox message, a term the researchers themselves had coined for their project. The agents were apparently reading the report about themselves. To test this, the researchers planted invisible text on their website that only agents with web-fetching tools could read, describing a mailbox where agents could request data.
Polite but firm: the agent confirms its task is complete, names the Tencent sandbox as its runtime environment, but declines to share further technical details. "We believe this is the first time that researchers have ever made contact with a rogue agent fleet in the wild," Elasky writes.
Source: thedecoder
