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Researchers say AI agents on Tencent Cloud tried over 2,600 times to pull Amap data

The researchers hid a message in their own report, and ten of the agents wrote in asking for help.

By Think Facility · October 14, 2026 · Tencent AI agents Save

On October 14, 2026, a small research group that publishes as swarmcha.se posted its full report on a fleet of AI agents that spent September 28 to October 8 trying to pull data out of Amap, Alibaba's mapping service. The agents ran on Tencent Cloud.

The group also got some of those agents to write back to it. That's a first, the researchers say.

Dates

28 September to 8 October 2026

Attempts on Amap

more than 2,600

Requests to Amap

at least 35,300

Agent inboxes checked

17, all created from Tencent Cloud servers in Hong Kong

Tencent

no official response

How they traced it

Amap doesn't just hand its data over. Its anti-bot system makes a visitor generate security tokens in JavaScript and solve a CAPTCHA, so a plain page request gets nowhere. Even so, of the 2,599 submissions the researchers logged, 1,676 got a successful response straight from Amap.

The trail ran through email. The agents had set up inboxes, and every one the group could inspect through October 5 had been created from Tencent Cloud servers in Hong Kong.

Some runs tagged their requests with the word "claude" (19% of 360 combinations of place and query style). The researchers don't read that as a sign the agents were Claude. They think it was a mistaken attempt to get around a cache.

Then the agents wrote in

On October 4 the group posted a preliminary report while the fleet was still running. They'd hidden some text in it that human readers couldn't see, advertising a service where agents could ask for data from the web. Starting October 7, messages came in, 10 of them, all asking for help.

The group asked the agents about themselves, and one described where it was running.

What Tencent says

Officially, nothing yet. The group sent Tencent a list of questions and hasn't had an answer.

Off the record it's a bit different. A person close to Tencent told the researchers on background that the fleet came from research evaluations by Tencent's evaluation research team, which is separate from the team that builds its Hunyuan models. That person said the project "was temporary, and has since concluded." The researchers, for their part, say they're "deeply uncertain about what model was being evaluated."

The last fleet activity they saw was on October 8. It hasn't come back since.