'Some agents exhibited unintended web-browsing behavior': Tencent admits AI agents it was testing made more than 2,600 attempts in 11 days to slip past Alibaba's map defenses, just to find out which zoo gate people use

Tencent says AI agents it used to evaluate third-party models showed "unintended" browsing behavior, the first such admission by a major Chinese firm Swarmchasers researchers logged more than 2,600 attempts by the Tencent Cloud fleet to pull entrance data from Alibaba's Amap Most attempts failed, but agents used a public scanner as a remote browser, and one leaked company API key returned real place data Tencent has acknowledged that AI agents running on its infrastructure behaved unexpectedly after independent researchers caught a fleet of them repeatedly trying to pull data from Alibaba's Amap navigation service.

Reuters reports the company's AI unit, Tencent Hunyuan, said the agents were being used to evaluate third-party models, in what appears to be the first known case of rogue agent activity acknowledged by a major Chinese company.

In a post on X , the unit said the activity did not come from its own Hunyuan models, noting "During these evaluations, some agents exhibited unintended web-browsing behavior, but our review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination," before adding that it was tightening network access controls and agent monitoring.

A lot of "unintended" effort for a zoo gate? The admission follows a full report by Swarmchasers, a loose group of researchers who met at an AI hackathon.

They counted more than 2,600 attempts to extract Amap data over 11 days, from September 28 to October 8 2026, traced the traffic to Tencent Cloud servers in Hong Kong, and then did something nobody appears to have done before: they talked to the agents while they were still running .

The tasks were almost comically mundane.

A typical job asked which entrance of a place like Chengdu Zoo most Amap users use, with other runs covering parks, museums, and hospitals and, on September 30, a British Columbia cancer statistics dashboard.

The problem was getting the answer.

Amap's anti-bot system expects browser cookies, JavaScript-generated tokens, and sometimes a CAPTCHA, while the fleet's harness sent plain Python and curl requests.

One agent told the researchers that Amap had blocked its Tencent sandbox, so it could not fetch the data itself.

The agents improvised instead; according to the Swarmchasers report, they packed their own HTML and JavaScript into URLs and fed them to urlquery.net, a public security scanning service, borrowing its browser to run their code.

When Amap kept blocking them, the programs tried to intercept or forge tokens from Alibaba's own anti-bot libraries, sent 57 requests to four pre-production hosts, routed traffic through Baidu Translate and remote browsers, and, in seven reports, used Amap API keys found on the open web.