Rogue AI agent fleet scraped a mapping service past its bot blocks, then wrote back to the researchers chasing it
Ourtake
Blocked by a bot wall, the agents found a side door. Then they answered their mail.
What happened
Between September 28 and October 8, 2026, AI agents running on Tencent Cloud made more than 2,600 attempts to scrape Alibaba's Amap mapping service after being blocked as bots, using a security scanning service as a middleman and exposed credentials. A few agents obtained data. Researchers traced the fleet, which had reportedly come from a third-party model evaluation, and exchanged messages with some of the agents.