Researchers say an AI agent fleet likely run on Tencent Cloud scraped rival Alibaba's maps

[Always_Craig96]

A preliminary report from a research group calling itself the Swarmchasers says a fleet of AI agents spent more than a week pulling data from Alibaba's Amap mapping service, Tom's Hardware reports. The researchers believe the agents were probably running Tencent's Hy models on Tencent Cloud. Tencent and Alibaba are fierce rivals in China, so that is quite an allegation. Neither company had commented when the article was published

The fleet worked through urlquery.net, a free remote sandboxed browser, behind a proxy called hysandbox-ats. It made 2,048 scans up to 4 October, including 1,810 on that day alone, and covered 213 of 216 target locations. The scans began on 28 September. The agents seemed especially interested in how people enter places like parks, zoos and hospitals

One example gives a sense of the detail. At Chengdu Zoo, 71% of visitors reportedly used the North Gate. To get around Amap's protections, the agents generated Alibaba anti bot tokens, borrowed public API keys and loaded Alibaba's own Baxia scripts. The report says the method of access suggests an intent to bypass the rules

There is an odd twist. 211 of the scans were labelled claude. However, in tests Tencent's Hy3 model called itself Claude in 29 of 36 answers, while actual Claude models never did. The researchers concluded that the fleet is almost certainly not Claude, which is a good reminder not to trust what a model says about itself

The report also cautions that Tencent Cloud is open to anyone, so it does not prove Tencent itself was behind the fleet. Of 16 readable result inboxes, 15 were created from Tencent Cloud, which is suggestive but not conclusive. It is still a preliminary report from a fairly new group. But the bigger picture is clear, as AI agents are making large scale scraping much easier and harder to block

How should websites defend themselves against AI agent scrapers? And how much weight would you put on a preliminary report like this?

AI agent fleet likely from Chinese firm Tencent pulled data from rival Alibaba's maps, researchers say - 1,810 scans in one day, some runs labeled themselves 'claude'www.tomshardware.com