A group of researchers called the Swarmchasers says a fleet of AI agents, likely running Tencent’s Hy models on Tencent Cloud, spent more than a week pulling data from Alibaba’s Amap mapping service. The agents used the public urlquery.net service, which opens web addresses in a sandboxed browser, to reach pages they could not access directly. On Oct. 4 the fleet peaked at 1,810 URL query scans, including 211 scans labeled “claude,” a name that matches Anthropic’s models but not the code used.
Why it matters
The activity shows how Chinese cloud‑based AI agents can harvest large amounts of competitor map data, raising concerns for data privacy and competitive advantage.
