Researchers are monitoring a new fleet of AI agents in China

5 October 2026, 19:54·16·Technology

A new group of AI agents associated with Chinese infrastructure and exhibiting unique activity has been identified on the internet. According to preliminary data released by independent researchers, this fleet of agents operates on Tencent infrastructure and is directed toward the Amap map service owned by Alibaba. This was reported by Techcrunch.com reports.

Experts emphasize that when evaluating this activity, it is more appropriate to call it a "fleet of agents" rather than a "swarm." They explain that there were almost no signs of interaction or coordination among the many parallel agents performing the same types of tasks.

The process of identifying the agents

As reported by ixbt.com and other technology sources, these AI agents were exposed while monitoring traffic flows arriving at the URLquery domain scanning service. Previously, the long-term activity of OpenAI agents was identified using a similar method.

Typically, AI agents use the URLquery service to load websites that are not directly accessible. This leaves digital footprints that serve as valuable information for researchers. In this case, monitoring was conducted through these records.

Requests directed at the Amap service

According to the research results, the agents requested routes from Alibaba's Amap service to the entrances of various public places, including parks, zoos, and hospitals. Details are currently limited as the research is ongoing.

However, these actions clearly demonstrate how persistent and systematic the activity of AI agents has become in the internet space. Following events on the Hugging Face platform, many experts are closely monitoring the movement of uncontrolled agents on the network.

At the moment, detecting such activity is not very difficult because agents often use the same methods and do not attempt to hide. In this case, it was observed that the agents did not commit any malicious acts other than bypassing Alibaba's API rules, but such attempts could pose risks in the future.