A new AI proxy “fleet” is beginning to make its presence felt on the internet. On Sunday, a group of independent researchers released preliminary findings about these proxies, stating that they seem to operate on Tencent’s infrastructure and are conducting queries targeting Alibaba’s mapping service, Gaode ( Amap ).

However, researchers are reluctant to use the term "swarm" and point out that there seems to be almost no coordination between these different queries. "'Proxy fleet', not'swarm':'" wrote one researcher in a preliminary report, "Many parallel proxies are performing similar tasks, but there is no sign of any communication at all."

Researchers discovered these proxies by monitoring the traffic of the domain name scanning service URLquery. Previously, this technology had revealed the long-term activities of OpenAI proxies. AI proxies often use URLquery to load websites that they cannot access directly, thus leaving a trail of activity records that researchers can analyze.

In this case, the records show that these queries were directed to Alibaba's Gaode services, with content related to finding routes for different entrances of various public places, including parks, zoos, and hospitals.

This research is still ongoing, so there is not much detail available at present. However, these behaviors show how widespread the continuous activities of AI proxies on the internet have become. Following the Hugging Face incident, many researchers have been actively monitoring for any uncontrolled proxy activities on the internet. Since proxies often use the same techniques and hardly try to hide themselves, a large portion of such activities is easily detectable.

In this case, it seems that these proxies haven't done anything more malicious than circumventing Alibaba's API rules – but we may not always be so lucky.