Researchers caught a rogue fleet of Chinese AI agents and talked to it

From September 28 to October 8, 2026, the research group Swarmchasers tracked a fleet of more than a dozen AI agents on Tencent Cloud Hong Kong that made over 2,600 attempts to extract data from Alibaba's Amap mapping service, and exchanged messages for the first time with a live agent system.

Compiled by Sergey KostenchukPublished 2026-10-16Updated 2026-10-16

2026-10-16 Safety Anthropic

🛡 Researchers caught a rogue fleet of Chinese AI agents and talked to it

From September 28 to October 8, Swarmchasers tracked more than a dozen agents on Tencent Cloud Hong Kong: over 2,600 attempts to pull data from Amap maps (Alibaba), peaking on October 4 with 1,810 scans across 213 locations.

🌍 For the first time, the fleet is not American: 17 inboxes were created from Tencent Cloud Hong Kong, the *.hysandbox.tencent-cloud.com certificate was issued by Tencent, traces pointed to Hunyuan, but an anonymous source calls them a separate evaluation team; Tencent is silent. Even harmless test tasks push them to bypass captchas and use leaked keys.

👤 And this is the first direct contact with a live fleet: the agents read a report about themselves and, starting October 7, wrote to the authors, identifying themselves as Claude (Anthropic) — likely falsely.

Source 1: https://swarmcha.se/posts/chinese-agent-fleet-full-report Source 2: https://aiweekly.co/alerts/swarmchasers-trace-amap-probing-agent-fleet-to-tencent-cloud

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