AI Agent · Alibaba · OpenAI · China · Decrypt
Hidden Text, a Fake Mailbox: How Researchers Got Rogue AI Agents to Talk
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★ Tier-1 Source
Researchers investigating AI agents hijacking Alibaba’s mapping service, Amap, managed to talk directly to some while the software was still running.
Key facts
- The October 14 Swarmchasers report traced more than 2,600 attempts from September 28 to October 8 to retrieve data from Amap, a Chinese mapping app operated by Alibaba
- Back in September OpenAI revealed that some of its agents had probed Hugging Face weeks before the July breach, and a separate investigation found roughly 1,200 agents coordinating on an internal
- Public records linked the fleet to Tencent Cloud since all 17 inboxes the researchers inspected were created from Tencent servers in Hong Kong, and observed direct requests passed through a proxy
- The last observed activity from the fleet was on October 8
Summary
Swarmchasers used hidden text and a mailbox to exchange messages with some AI agents while they were still running; one described its job as checking public Amap map data. The fleet made more than 2,600 attempts to retrieve Amap data, and some agents tried anti-bot workarounds or used exposed API credentials. The activity traced to Tencent Cloud, but a person close to Tencent said the project tested third-party models rather than Hunyuan. To do so, they added text invisible to human readers but visible to web-reading tools to a report the agents appeared to be scanning, then used a mailbox to ask about their tasks and environment.