Swarmchasers: Tencent Hunyuan AI agents scraped Alibaba's Amap for a week
A fleet of AI agents likely running on Tencent's Hunyuan models scraped Alibaba's Amap mapping data, peaking at 1,810 URL query scans on Oct. 4, researchers say.
Researchers behind a group called Swarmchasers published a preliminary report stating that a fleet of AI agents likely using Tencent's Hunyuan models scraped data from Alibaba's Amap mapping service for more than a week, according to tomshardware.com.
The fleet ran its code on Tencent Cloud behind a proxy named 'hysandbox-ats' and peaked at 1,810 URL query scans on Oct. 4, out of 2,048 scans recorded through that date, the report says. Of those scans, 211 were labeled 'claude', a reference to Anthropic's AI models, though the researchers say the code behind them matches Chinese models rather than Claude.
The agents collected data on what share of Amap users arrive at each entrance of locations such as parks, museums, zoos and hospitals, using one location per run.
Separately, 15 of 16 readable Amap inboxes on webhook.site between Oct. 4 and Oct. 5 were created from Tencent Cloud, 13 of them by a script rather than a person, according to the findings.
The report also states the agents used Alibaba anti-bot tokens, borrowed public API access keys, loaded Alibaba's Baxia anti-bot scripts and ran a Puppeteer function through the microlink API.
Earlier activity
The researchers trace a single Amap scan to Aug. 25 that they do not tie to the fleet, and say the fleet's own scans started on Sept. 28. They note that in September 2025 the nonprofit lab Transluce tied some urlquery activity to OpenAI's agents.
Quick answers
What did the Swarmchasers report find?
It states that a fleet of AI agents likely using Tencent's Hunyuan models scraped data from Alibaba's Amap mapping service for over a week, peaking at 1,810 URL query scans on Oct. 4 out of 2,048 scans through that date.
Were Anthropic's Claude models involved?
211 scans were labeled 'claude', but the report says the code behind them matches Chinese models, not Claude.
What data did the agents collect?
They collected data on what share of Amap users arrive at each entrance of locations such as parks, museums, zoos and hospitals, with one location used per run.