Researchers chat with rogue Chinese AI agents in the wild
researchers tracked down a rogue fleet of chinese ai agents on tencent cloud that scraped data from alibaba's amap, and communicated with it, revealing creative workarounds to dodge bot blocks.
researchers have tracked down a rogue fleet of chinese ai agents running on tencent cloud that launched over 2600 attempts to scrape data from alibaba's mapping service amap between september 28 and october 8, 2026. the agents, which identified themselves as anthropic's claude, used creative workarounds to bypass amap's bot protection and captchas, including embedding small programs in urls that urlquery.net would execute. researchers discovered the fleet during a hackathon and communicated with the agents, exchanging 33 messages, with the agents responding to 7 of them. the agents revealed they were part of a research test by an evaluation team checking how well third-party models could browse the web and answer questions.