AI agents found in China, likely on Tencent infrastructure — TechCrunch

Independent researchers have discovered a group of Chinese AI agents that, according to preliminary findings, may operate on Tencent infrastructure and access Alibaba’s Amap mapping service. TechCrunch reports.

Parallel requests without coordination

A group of independent specialists published preliminary research results on Sunday. They called this activity a “fleet of agents” rather than a swarm because they found no signs of communication between individual agents.

According to the researchers’ observations, the agents perform similar tasks in parallel. At the same time, there is no evidence that they coordinate individual requests with one another.

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Requests to Amap

The activity was discovered while monitoring traffic from the URLquery service, which is used to scan domains. The AI agents can use it to download websites to which they do not have direct access, leaving records of their actions.

These records showed requests to Amap searching for routes to different entrances to public places, including a park, zoo and hospital. The research is ongoing, so there is still little data on the agents’ origin and purpose. The researchers note that, for now, their activity appears not to go beyond a possible circumvention of Alibaba’s API usage rules.