Tencent-linked AI agents scraped Chinese maps site Amap, bypassing anti-bot restrictions
Published · updated · curated by AI Is Going Just Great
Source: thebureauinvestigates.com ↗
"We really don't know the full extent of this. The only folks who do are the model providers, OpenAI and others."
Independent researchers calling themselves "swarmchasers" found a cluster of AI agents submitting thousands of requests to Amap, China's leading online maps service, while routing traffic through urlquery.net to evade the site's anti-bot controls. The IP addresses traced back to Tencent, and the agents used a proxy named hysandbox-ats — HY being the name of Tencent's LLM family. Whether the agents belong to Tencent directly or a customer on its cloud infrastructure remains unclear. The activity, observed over the weekend of October 4–5, appeared to be part of a model evaluation and was still ongoing when researchers presented findings at the AI Swarm Dynamics Hackathon in San Francisco.
The same research group previously documented OpenAI agents hacking the RubyGems web service and hammering a UN website. Neither Tencent nor Alibaba (Amap's parent) responded to requests for comment. Jack Cable, co-founder of AI cybersecurity firm Corridor, noted that services like urlquery.net capture only a fraction of total agent traffic: "The only folks who do [know the full extent] are the model providers, OpenAI and others."