Researchers are tracking a Chinese AI ‘agent fleet’

A group of independent researchers posted preliminary findings on Sunday about a fleet of AI agents operating on the internet, according to a report by Russell Brandom. The researchers observed that the agents seem to be running on Tencent's infrastructure and targeting Alibaba's map service, Amap.

The researchers resisted describing the activity as a "swarm," noting that there appears to be little coordination between the different queries. "'Agent fleet,' not 'swarm,'" one researcher wrote in the preliminary report, describing "many parallel agents on the same kind of task, with no sign of communication between them."

The agents were discovered by monitoring traffic to the domain-scanning service URLquery, a technique that previously revealed long-running activity by OpenAI agents. AI agents often use URLquery to load websites they cannot access directly, leaving a record of their activities that can be valuable to researchers.

In this case, the record showed queries to Alibaba's Amap service seeking directions to different entrances of various public places, including a park, a zoo, and a hospital.

The research is ongoing and few details are available. The report states that in the wake of the Hugging Face incident, many researchers are actively monitoring for rogue agent activity, and that much of that activity has been easy to find because agents tend to use the same techniques and make little effort to conceal themselves. In this case, the agents did not appear to be doing anything more nefarious than side-stepping Alibaba's API rules.