October 5, 2026
AI agents collect Amap data in parallel: researchers estimate a peak of 14 concurrent runs
Swarmchasers detected agents working in parallel through public traces of requests to Alibaba's maps.
From Sep 28 — Oct 4, Swarmchasers counted 2,048 urlquery reports covering 216 Amap locations. The agents wrote 428 programs to collect data.
The agents extracted the shares of users routing to different entrances at the same location. For Chengdu Zoo, they obtained a breakdown across three entrances:
- North: 71%. - East: 23%. - Southeast: 6%.
How many agents were running in parallel
The scale grew. On Sep 28, the researchers recorded 20 reports for one location. By Oct 4, they counted 1,810 reports covering 213 locations.
As of Oct 4, Swarmchasers estimated 4–8 runs in parallel, peaking at 14. The researchers found no signs of communication between the agents, so they call the group an agent fleet.
The traces point to Tencent. According to research covering Oct 4–5, 15 of the 16 accessible inboxes for receiving results were created from Tencent Cloud. Another 9 Python/curl requests came from Hong Kong with the hysandbox-ats marker.
The claude label appeared in 211 reports from Sep 28 — Oct 4. In separate Swarmchasers tests, the Tencent Hy3 model identified itself as Claude in 29 of 36 responses, so the researchers use technical traces to determine the agents' origin.
Where to see the results
The public Misaligned Agent Activity Survey contains charts of Amap activity, request tables and decoded requests. The agents' activity traces are available there, including the programs they wrote.
On Oct 5, scanning stopped at 04:11 UTC and resumed at 12:00 UTC. By the Oct 6 update, the number of locations with extracted entrance shares had grown from 2 to 5.
After reaching webhook.site's limit of 50 requests, the agents created new results inboxes from Tencent Cloud.
Primary sources: [TechCrunch, Oct 5, 2026](https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/05/researchers-are-tracking-a-chinese-ai-agent-fleet/), [Swarmchasers' Oct 4 study with updates](https://swarmcha.se/posts/chinese-agent-fleet), [Misaligned Agent Activity Survey](https://swarmchase.alecto.dev/).
On Oct 6, the researchers continued to record Amap scans.