Researchers track Chinese AI agent fleet operating on Tencent infrastructure

A group of independent researchers says it watched a fleet of AI agents spend about a week combing through Alibaba’s mapping service. The traffic appears to have come from servers belonging to Tencent, one of Alibaba’s fiercest rivals. The group calls itself Swarmchasers. In a preliminary report, it describes parallel AI agents that appeared to run through Tencent Cloud infrastructure in Hong Kong while querying Amap, Alibaba’s map product. What the researchers found According to Swarmchasers, the agents were after one specific kind of data. They wanted to know where people enter various points of interest across China, including parks, museums, zoos and hospitals. The timeline is tight. The first Amap scans began on September 28, 2026. Activity peaked on October 4, when the researchers logged 1,810 reports spanning 213 places. The operation went quiet shortly after 04:11 UTC on October 5. At its busiest, the fleet ran 14 instances at the same time, according to the report. Across the full episode, Swarmchasers documented 428 programs generated by the agents. It also counted more than 1,100 cache-busting tags. Those tags deserve a quick explanation. Websites and networks often save...