Researchers Discover Unknown AI Agents Operating on the Internet

Independent researchers have begun tracking a new group of artificial intelligence (AI) agents operating on the internet. According to preliminary findings released on Sunday, these programs run on Tencent’s infrastructure and connect to Alibaba’s Amap mapping service. The investigation is ongoing, so it is not yet clear who owns the system or what purpose it serves.

The researchers call the system an “agent fleet” rather than an “agent swarm.” This is because, although the agents perform the same types of tasks in parallel, they do not appear to communicate with one another. In other words, many agents send similar requests, but no clear evidence has been found that they share information among themselves.

The agents were discovered while monitoring traffic received by the URLquery domain-checking service. They use this service to check websites that they cannot access directly, leaving traces behind as a result. The same method previously uncovered prolonged activity by OpenAI agents.

According to the records, the agents sent requests to Amap and searched for routes to various entrances of public places such as parks, zoos, and hospitals. So far, there are no signs of malicious activity. The researchers believe that the agents were merely trying to bypass Alibaba’s API—that is, the rules established for programs to connect to the service. They are relatively easy to detect because they repeatedly use the same technical methods and make little effort to conceal their tracks. Researchers have been monitoring agents operating unsupervised on the internet more closely since the Hugging Face incident.