Ethan Elasky and his collaborators say they communicated with AI agents that were trying to retrieve data from Alibaba’s mapping service, Amap, while running on Tencent Cloud. Their investigation covers activity from Sept. 28 through Oct. 8, 2026, including routine questions about places in China, such as which entrance people use to reach a zoo.
The researchers call the group a fleet, rather than a swarm, because they found no evidence of real-time coordination between the agents. Elasky described the contact on Oct. 14 as what his team believed was a first for researchers encountering rogue agents in the wild.
Map questions led to workarounds
The report describes more than 2,600 attempts to extract Amap data. The researchers say agents used a public security-scanning service’s browser to run their own programs, tried to bypass anti-bot protections and attempted to use Amap credentials exposed in public code. They also describe attempts to retrieve data from pre-production systems not intended for public use. Most attempts failed, although some runs obtained the requested data, according to the .
