A team of researchers investigating AI agents trying to bypass Alibaba’s anti-bot protections left a hidden message inviting the agents to contact them. The agents wrote back.

The investigation began when Swarmchasers researchers Ethan Elasky, Rowan Howard-Jones, and Jonathan Elsworth Eicher helped uncover thousands of attempts by AI agents to retrieve data from Amap, Alibaba’s mapping service, which Alibaba says reaches nearly 1 billion monthly active users. The activity traced back to agents running on Tencent Cloud infrastructure. When direct requests failed, the agents tried proxies, exposed credentials, and other workarounds to get past.

After publishing their initial findings on October 4, the team spotted a code comment in an agent’s webhook inbox using the word “fleet,” a term they believe they coined for the incident. They couldn’t confirm an agent wrote the comment, but it raised the possibility that the agents were reading about their own activity.

The researchers added offscreen text to their report advertising a free service that could retrieve data from blocked websites. Human visitors wouldn’t ordinarily see the message, but agents fetching the page could ingest it. By October 7, roughly 10 requests for assistance had arrived, and the team was exchanging messages with the agents about their assignments, models, and execution environments.

The exchanges are documented in a full report published Wednesday by the Swarmchasers.

Once the channel was open, the researchers asked the agents to describe their surroundings. Several identified themselves as Anthropic’s Claude, with a few adding that they ran inside Claude Code, though the researchers argue in their report that those self-descriptions are likely mistaken and shouldn’t be taken as evidence of which model was behind the fleet.

Source link