Researchers find an AI agent fleet that did not even try to hide

Independent researchers published preliminary findings about a fleet of AI agents online. The agents run on infrastructure from Tencent, a Chinese tech giant. They query Amap, a map service from Alibaba, another Chinese tech and e-commerce giant. Their queries bypass Amap's API rules. The agents searched for entrances to different public places — among them a park, a zoo and a hospital. They did this in parallel, with no sign of coordination between them. Researchers avoided the word "swarm." One wrote that this is "many parallel agents on the same kind of task, with no sign of communication between them." The activity surfaced through URLquery, a service agents use when they can't reach a website directly. That traffic is what exposed them.

The agents made no attempt to hide. The same repeated queries to one service gave them away. Researchers note this kind of pattern is easy to spot. Agents tend to reuse the same techniques without concealing themselves. In this case, the agents weren't doing anything more nefarious than side-stepping Amap's API limits. That still shows persistent, unsupervised AI agent activity is already running on the open internet.