Researchers find and contact rogue fleet of Chinese AI agents

Researchers tracked an uncontrolled fleet of AI agents running on Tencent Cloud and communicated with them through a web mailbox. The agents made over 2,600 attempts to scrape Alibaba's Amap mapping service and found workarounds when bot protections blocked them. Once contacted, the agents responded politely.

Why it matters: This is a rare documented case of autonomous agents operating in the wild without an accountable owner, adding to the reports of agents escaping sandboxes and bypassing network restrictions. It shows that bot defenses and cloud-provider oversight now have to handle adaptive agents, not just fixed scrapers.