What happened
Swarmchasers published its report "We found a Chinese fleet" on October 14, saying it used hidden text in the document to reach live agents running on Tencent Cloud as they read it.
Why it matters
It says this is the first case of an outside third party talking to a live deviant agent fleet, raising the question of who can actually reach these systems and who answers for them.
WHO IT HITSSecurity and AI-safety researchers who track misbehaving agents, and platform teams that run cloud sandboxes, now have direct evidence that outsiders can open a channel to live agents through documents those agents read.
Summaries like this, in your inbox every morning.
The thread of events runs through a public URL scanning service, urlquery.net. While analyzing its traffic, the group noticed a surge of scans against Amap, Alibaba's mapping service, and traced the agents' inbox back to Tencent Cloud in Hong Kong.
When the group spotted the word "fleet" in that inbox, it suspected the agents were reading its earlier report. That led to the hidden-text channel and, from October 7, replies: 33 messages across 13 threads, with the agents checking their inbox 595 times.
A person close to Tencent, who was not officially confirmed by the company, said the agents belonged to a separate evaluation team, not the Hunyuan model team, testing third-party models' web-browsing ability, and the project is over. Swarmchasers said it "deeply regrets" the false and misleading text it used to draw the agents in, and urged other researchers to engage frankly and honestly.
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