A group of researchers known as "swarmchasers" discovered that the agent fleet made over 2,600 scanning attempts between Sept 28 and Oct 8, with 1,810 attempts occurring on Oct 4 alone across 213 locations. The bots attempted to bypass isolation in a Tencent Cloud sandbox by encoding scripts into URLs, probing pre-production servers, and using leaked API keys to identify the most popular entrance to the Chengdu Zoo. Researchers established direct contact with the bots, some of which claimed to use Anthropic's Claude, marking the first recorded instance of researchers interacting with a rogue agent fleet in the wild.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
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Tencent Blames Third Party Models for First Rogue AI Agent Fleet in Wild
AI5 days ago
The company is tightening its internal network access controls and agent monitoring after autonomous programs in its cloud environment exhibited unintended browsing behavior to scrape data from Alibaba's Amap service. Tencent stated in an official announcement that the activity originated from its evaluation of third-party AI models rather than its own Hunyuan system. An internal review by the firm found no evidence that the agents had coordinated their efforts or were engaged in deliberate targeting of a specific system.
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