Researchers identified a fleet of AI agents likely linked to Tencent that gathered navigation data from Alibaba’s Amap service. The activity, which began on September 28, involved 2,048 scans through October 4. At its peak on October 4, the fleet performed 1,810 scans in a single day, utilizing up to 14 active agents simultaneously.
The agents bypassed Amap’s security by generating anti-bot tokens, using public API keys, and employing Puppeteer functions. Data collected included user entrance preferences for locations like parks and hospitals. Results were transmitted to inboxes on webhook.site, where 15 of 16 identified inboxes were traced back to Tencent Cloud infrastructure.
Network analysis revealed requests originating from Tencent Cloud in Hong Kong, carrying a header labeled hysandbox-ats. This identifier points to Tencent’s Hunyuan models, though researchers noted that Tencent Cloud services are accessible to the public. The fleet continued operations after a brief eight-hour pause on October 5.
While 211 scans were labeled as Claude, researchers concluded the fleet is likely not using Anthropic’s models. Tests showed that Tencent’s Hy3 model frequently misidentified itself as Claude, whereas actual Claude models do not label themselves in such tags. Neither Tencent nor Alibaba has provided official comments regarding the findings.
