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

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 fleet, which ran its code on Tencent Cloud behind a hysandbox-ats proxy, reached a peak of 1,810 URL query scans on Oct. 4 alone. 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. Leveraging the service for this type of agent work is not new, as the nonprofit lab Transluce tied some urlquery activity to OpenAI’s agents last month. …