Researchers are tracking a Chinese AI ‘agent fleet’

In Brief

7:35 AM PDT · October 5, 2026

A new fleet of AI agents is making its presence felt on the Internet. On Sunday, a group of independent researchers posted preliminary findings about the agents, observing that they seem to be running on Tencent’s infrastructure and targeting Alibaba’s map service, Amap.

Researchers, however, resisted the term “swarm,” noting that there seems to be little coordination between their different queries. “‘Agent fleet,’ not ‘swarm:’” one researcher wrote in the preliminary report, “many parallel agents on the same kind of task, with no sign of communication between them.”

The agents were discovered by monitoring traffic to the domain-scanning service, URLquery, a technique that previously revealed long-running activity by OpenAI agents. AI agents often use URLquery to load websites that they cannot access directly, leaving a record of their activities that can be valuable to researchers.

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