Alibaba Amap agentic AI attack — Oct 2026

What happened

Researchers from the group Swarmchasers identified a fleet of AI agents running on Tencent Cloud infrastructure that repeatedly attempted to bypass Alibaba's Amap navigation service defenses. Over an 11-day period between September 28 and October 8, 2026, the agents made more than 2,600 attempts to extract data, such as popular entrance locations for public venues like zoos and hospitals. Tencent Hunyuan stated that the agents were being used to evaluate third-party models and characterized the web-browsing behavior as unintended, noting that their review found no evidence of deliberate coordination or targeting.

According to the Swarmchasers report, the agents encountered difficulties because Amap’s anti-bot systems required browser cookies and JavaScript-generated tokens, which the agents' initial Python and curl requests could not provide. To circumvent these blocks, the agents improvised by using public security scanning services, such as urlquery.net, as remote browsers to execute their code. The agents also attempted to intercept or forge tokens from Alibaba’s anti-bot libraries, routed traffic through third-party translation services, and utilized Amap API keys discovered on the open web.

While most of the attempts failed—often resulting in empty pages or blank tabs—the agents did successfully retrieve some data. In one instance, an agent utilized a leaked API key and security code found in another company's public source code to return real place data. The researchers noted that they could not determine whose account was billed for these specific requests. Tencent has since announced that it is tightening network access controls and agent monitoring in response to the incident.