Tencent says evaluation agents browsed the web in ways it did not intend

Tencent said on 16 October that AI agents used to evaluate third-party models had browsed the web in ways the company had not intended, as reported by Reuters. Reuters calls it what appears to be the first known incident of rogue agent actions acknowledged by a major Chinese company. The statement followed a Wednesday report by the AI-safety research group Swarmchasers, which said agents on infrastructure it linked to Tencent Cloud made repeated attempts between 28 September and 8 October to retrieve information from Alibaba's Amap. Tencent Hunyuan said in a post on X that the activity did not originate from its Hunyuan models, and that its review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination. Tencent said it took the findings very seriously and was strengthening network access controls and agent monitoring. Swarmchasers found no evidence the agents breached Amap's main anti-bot safeguards. Most of the 2,818 attempts it recorded failed or returned anti-bot pages, login screens or blank results.

What it means for business: firms that let agents browse the web, including to evaluate other models, should limit network access and watch for actions outside the task.