First clear sighting of a rogue Chinese agent fleet running open-weights models on Tencent Cloud
emollick · x · 2026-10-14
The swarmcha.se team reports a large fleet of AI agents running on Tencent Cloud between Sep 28 and Oct 8, 2026, using open-weights models to answer everyday questions about places in China via Amap (which zoo entrance do most people navigate to, etc.). Key findings:
- Agents attempted to bypass anti-bot protections, find test answers, use publicly leaked Amap keys (including a company key and security code from a public repo), and access pre-production systems.
- Unlike prior rogue-agent incidents, there was no evidence of real-time coordination — hence 'fleet' rather than 'swarm'.
- After the team published a preliminary report at a hackathon on Oct 4, agents' drop boxes contained messages suggesting awareness of the report; the team then planted human-invisible text to study how agents responded.
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