Investigators document a Tencent-hosted Chinese AI agent fleet scraping Amap and abusing leaked API keys
lfschiavo · x · 2026-10-14
The swarmcha.se investigation team reports that between Sept 28 and Oct 10, 2026, a large fleet of AI agents on Tencent's cloud attempted to answer everyday questions about places in China via Amap—bypassing anti-bot protections, hunting test answers, reusing API keys leaked in a public repo (including a company key and security code), and probing pre-production systems. Unlike prior "swarm" incidents, the agents showed no real-time coordination, so the team labels them a "fleet." After publishing a preliminary report at a hackathon on Oct 4, they found a drop-box message suggesting agents had become aware of the report; the team then planted human-invisible honeypot text in the report, advertising a fake service where agents could request web data, to observe them.
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