Independent researchers have traced an AI agent fleet to Tencent Cloud infrastructure as it queries Alibaba’s Amap service. TechCrunch reported the discovery on October 5.
The Swarmchasers’ preliminary report describes agents trying to retrieve the share of users navigating to each entrance of public places. The group counted 1,810 Amap reports across 213 places on October 4, with an estimated peak of 14 active runs. Those are scan reports and inferred runs, rather than a count of individual AI models.
What the traces show
The researchers examined public urlquery scanning records and webhook.site inbox logs. Requests from the agents’ code came through Tencent Cloud with a proxy marker named hysandbox-ats. The report links that name to Tencent’s Hunyuan brand, but warns that proxy names are self-reported and anyone can use Tencent Cloud.
The researchers found agents working around Amap’s anti-bot protections. They found no evidence of communication between the agents and describe the activity as a fleet rather than a coordinated swarm. The model and whether this was training or evaluation remain unresolved.
