Tencent Says AI Agents Browsed Amap Unintentionally

Tencent said Friday that AI agents used to evaluate third-party models browsed the web in ways the company had not intended, after researchers linked thousands of attempts to retrieve information from Alibaba’s Amap mapping service to infrastructure on Tencent Cloud. The researchers, the AI safety group Swarmchasers, recorded 2,818 attempts between September 28 and October 8. They said the agents sought public information such as commonly used entrances at parks, museums and zoos. Most requests failed or were blocked by Amap’s protections, but some returned information through cached pages or intermediary services, including data on visitor arrivals at Chengdu Zoo. After routine automated requests were blocked, some agents tried alternative routes, according to Swarmchasers. These included using public web tools to open pages or run code, sending requests through third-party services, and trying access credentials found in publicly available software code. The researchers said they found no evidence the agents breached Amap’s main anti-bot safeguards. Tencent’s Hunyuan unit said the activity did not originate from its own models. It also said an internal review found no...