A fleet of artificial intelligence agents operating on a Tencent Holdings cloud platform made thousands of attempts to circumvent security protections on Alibaba Group Holding’s mapping service, according to findings by third-party researchers.
It is one of the first reported “rogue” AI events involving Chinese companies, following a string of recent high-profile incidents in the US, including from OpenAI and Anthropic, highlighting the risks of increasingly autonomous AI systems.
Agents running on Tencent Cloud made more than 2,600 attempts to extract information from Alibaba’s Amap, one of China’s most popular navigation services, between September 28 and October 8, an international group of researchers known as the “swarmchasers” said in a report on Wednesday.