Hajra Naz
A new fleet of AI agents is making its presence felt on the internet. On Sunday, a group of independent researchers posted preliminary findings about these agents. They observed something specific. The agents appear to be running on Tencent’s infrastructure. They’re targeting Alibaba’s map service, called Amap.
Researchers pushed back against using the term “swarm,” though. They noted little coordination between the agents’ different queries. “‘Agent fleet,’ not ‘swarm,'” one researcher wrote in the preliminary report. “Many parallel agents on the same kind of task, with no sign of communication between them.”
Researchers discovered these agents through a specific monitoring technique. Researchers tracked traffic to urlquery, a domain-scanning service. This same method previously revealed long-running activity by OpenAI agents. AI agents often use urlquery to load websites they can’t access directly. This leaves a record of their activities, which proves valuable for researchers studying them.
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In this specific case, the record showed queries to Alibaba’s Amap service. The agents were seeking directions to different entrances of various public places. That included a park, a zoo, and a hospital.
This research remains ongoing, so few details are currently available. Still, this behavior demonstrates how persistent AI agent activity has become across the internet. Following the Hugging Face incident, many researchers are now actively monitoring for rogue agent activity online. Much of this activity has proven relatively easy to find. Agents tend to reuse similar techniques. They also make little effort to conceal their presence.
In this particular case, the agents don’t appear to have done anything especially nefarious. Their activity seems limited to simply side-stepping Alibaba’s API rules. Still, researchers caution that future cases may not always turn out this way.
