Researchers track a Chinese AI ‘agent fleet’

On Sunday, a group of independent researchers published preliminary findings about a new set of AI agents making their presence felt across the internet. By their account, the agents appear to run on Tencent’s infrastructure while querying Alibaba’s map service, Amap.

Notably, the researchers themselves pushed back on the word “swarm.” There is no apparent coordination between the individual agents’ queries, so the report offers a different label. “‘Agent fleet,’ not ‘swarm,’” one of the authors writes — “many parallel agents on the same kind of task, with no sign of communication between them.”

How they were found

The agents were spotted by monitoring traffic to the domain-scanning service URLquery. The same technique previously surfaced long-running activity by OpenAI agents. AI agents often lean on URLquery to load sites they cannot reach directly, leaving behind a record that is valuable to researchers.

Here, that record showed queries to Amap seeking directions to various entrances of public places — a park, a zoo, and a hospital.

What it means

Few details are available and the research is ongoing. Still, the case shows how persistent AI agent activity on the internet has become. In the wake of the Hugging Face incident, many researchers are now actively watching for rogue agents. Much of that activity is easy to find, since agents tend to reuse the same techniques and make little effort to hide.

This time the agents don’t seem to have been up to anything more sinister than side-stepping Alibaba’s API rules. But, as the researchers note, we may not always be so lucky.

Source: TechCrunch