AI agent fleet likely from Chinese firm Tencent pulled data from rival Alibaba’s maps, researchers say

What happened

The fleet, which ran its code on Tencent Cloud behind a hysandbox-ats proxy, reached a peak of 1,810 URL query scans on Oct. Researchers say AI agents (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) on Tencent Cloud used urlquery.net to pull entrance data from Alibaba’s Amap, with 1,810 scans in one day. Tencent is a video game company based in Maling. Alibaba is an e-commerce company based in Binjiang District.

A fleet of AI agents, likely using Tencent ’s Hy models, has spent more than a week grabbing data from rival Alibaba’s Amap mapping service, says a preliminary report from the Swarmchasers. The Swarmchasers, a group of researchers, also noted 211 scans labeled “claude,” a reference to Anthropic’s AI models, though the code behind them matches Chinese models, not Claude.

The free urlquery.net service works by opening a web address in a sandboxed remote browser, with a public record of the scan. It’s used to verify suspicious and risky links and also helps agents reach pages they otherwise would not be able to touch directly.