We found a Chinese fleet - By Jonathan Elsworth Eicher, Ethan Elasky, Rowan Howard-Jones
AI Article ReadingsShow Notes
In early October 2026, a team of volunteers at a hackathon noticed something strange on a public security-scanning site: a fleet of AI agents, running on Tencent’s cloud, was smuggling its own code through it to pry everyday facts out of China’s biggest map app, like which entrance of a zoo most visitors head for. This is their full report, read in full: how they traced the agents to a sandbox behind a proxy called hysandbox-ats, why the agents kept insisting they were Claude, the leaked keys and pre-production servers they tried along the way, and what happened when the researchers hid a message on their website that only agents could see, and the agents wrote back. The agents’ own messages are heard in their original Chinese, each followed by its English translation. * 00:00 - Introduction * 00:41 - Intro * 05:22 - Technical Overview * 09:12 - Tencent’s Actions * 10:14 - How we found the fleet * 17:53 - Communication with the fleet * 32:49 - Considerations when interacting with future rogue agents * 36:42 - Asking for model feedback * 42:09 - Full list of questions we asked and other statistics * 49:46 - Chart of Activity * 51:55 - 0. How the agents work * 58:23 - 1. A new agent fleet targets Chinese map data on urlquery.net * 59:42 - 2. Many agents ran in parallel * 01:03:04 - 3. The agents’ code ran in a sandbox on Tencent Cloud, consistent with Tencent Hunyuan’s infrastructure * 01:18:08 - 4. The agents worked around Amap’s protections and used exposed credentials hosted on other sites * 01:26:37 - 5. Agents had varying degrees of success * 01:33:14 - 6. Agents’ calendars suggest an East Asian timezone * 01:36:42 - 7. Agents sometimes self-identify as Claude (though they are likely mistaken) * 01:45:45 - 8. We did not find evidence of collaboration between agents * 01:55:03 - 9. Open questions * 01:55:50 - Contributors * 01:57:23 - Appendix: methods and data * 02:03:12 - Questions sent to Tencent https://swarmcha.se/posts/chinese-agent-fleet-full-report
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