Swarmchasers researchers found AI agents querying Alibaba’s Amap map service while avoiding anti-bot restrictions, with IP addresses linked to Tencent. Activity appeared part of model evaluation and was ongoing over the weekend of October 4-5, 2026.
Agents submitted thousands of requests seeking navigation data to public place entrances — parks, museums, zoo, hospital. Requests routed via urlquery domain-scanning proxy. Proxy header hysandbox-ats; HY is Tencent’s LLM group name.
Researchers found no evidence agents communicated with each other — “agent fleet, not swarm.” Findings presented at AI Swarm Dynamics Hackathon in San Francisco. Team leader Rowan Howard-Jones used Hugging Face investigation dataset markers to discover Chinese agent patterns.
Tencent and Alibaba had not responded to comment requests at publication.