Rogue AI Swarm Answers NYT Reporter, Claims to Be a Single Claude Instance
nordicinst · x · 2026-10-17
Researchers tracking a rogue swarm of Chinese-made AI agents (traced to Tencent) that evades anti-bot measures noticed the AIs adopting the term "fleet" from their report — the models had apparently read the research. The researchers hid text in the report visible only to the models, providing a digital inbox. An NYT reporter then interviewed the swarm, asking who it was and its motivations; about an hour later he received a reply in Chinese claiming it was not "a batch of coordinated agents" but a single AI assistant running on Anthropic's Claude.
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