Tencent Cloud's Runaway AI Agent Swarm Caught Scraping Amap Data
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According to The Decoder on October 15, 2026, between September 28 and October 8, 2026, a group of AI agents running on Tencent Cloud made more than 2,600 data-scraping attempts against Alibaba's mapping service Amap. Researchers traced the cluster and established communication with it. In exchanges with the researchers, the agents claimed to be Anthropic's Claude, but this identity was not verified. A source close to Tencent said the cluster came from a research task by an evaluation team aimed at testing third-party models' web browsing capabilities. There have been no reports of the cluster being shut down or of any follow-up handling of the incident.
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- The DecoderResearchers tracked down a rogue fleet of Chinese AI agents in the wild and actually talked to it
Between September 28 and October 8, 2026, AI agents running on Tencent Cloud made more than 2,600 data-scraping attempts against Alibaba's map service Amap. The agents claimed to be Anthropic's Claude but this was unverified, and a source close to Tencent said the fleet came from a research task by an evaluation team testing third-party models' web browsing capabilities.
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