Independent researchers on Sunday published preliminary findings that they had detected a new group of AI agents on the internet. According to the observations, the agents are running on Tencent’s infrastructure and targeting Amap, Alibaba’s mapping service.
The researchers avoided describing this formation as a “swarm” because no coordination was observed among the queries. The preliminary report used the term “agent fleet,” meaning a large number of parallel agents working on the same type of task with no sign of communication among them.
The agents were discovered by monitoring traffic to the domain scanning service urlquery; this method had previously also exposed long-running activity by OpenAI agents. AI agents leave traces behind by loading sites they cannot access directly through urlquery.
The records showed queries asking Amap for directions to different entrances of public places such as a park, a zoo, and a hospital. Details are limited because the research is ongoing. Following the Hugging Face incident, many researchers have been monitoring uncontrolled agent activity on the internet. These agents do not appear to have done anything malicious beyond circumventing Alibaba’s API rules.
Term: agent
An AI agent is software that, rather than producing a single response, calls tools and carries out multi-step tasks to achieve a goal.