Security researchers at the Swarmchasers group say a fleet of AI agents, probably built on Tencent's Hy models, spent more than a week pulling navigation data from Alibaba's Amap mapping service via the urlquery.net sandbox tool. The fleet peaked at 1,810 URL scans on October 4, targeting entrance-usage data at locations like zoos, parks and hospitals, running on Tencent Cloud behind a proxy. Some scans were labeled 'claude,' but the underlying code reportedly resembles Chinese models rather than Anthropic's.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-07
Independent researchers monitoring the urlquery domain-scanning service say they've detected a large group of AI agents, apparently running on Tencent infrastructure, repeatedly querying Alibaba's Amap mapping service for directions to entrances of parks, zoos, and hospitals. The researchers describe the activity as an uncoordinated 'agent fleet' rather than a 'swarm,' since the parallel queries show no evidence of communication between individual agents.
tech.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-06
Independent researchers reported Sunday that they detected a large group of AI agents operating on Tencent's infrastructure, repeatedly querying Alibaba's Amap mapping service for directions to entrances of parks, zoos and hospitals. The agents were identified through traffic to URLquery, a domain-scanning tool AI agents use to access sites indirectly, which left a traceable record of the activity. Researchers described the behavior as a loosely coordinated 'agent fleet' rather than a 'swarm,' since the parallel queries showed no sign of communication between individual agents.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-05
Reddit users reported seeing Instagram ads promoting pet incinerators, including devices marketed as 'Pet Animal Cremation Machine' and 'Smokeless Domestic Rubbish Incinerator,' sold through Alibaba and its sister site AliExpress. The ads, which appeared on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, featured AI-generated images of healthy-looking cats and dogs posed beside the combustion equipment. Meta's ad library confirms some of these listings were run by Alibaba, though it's unclear if they match the exact ads users saw.
futurism.com
· 2026-10-03
Rep. Ro Khanna, top Democrat on the House Select Committee on China, sent letters to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and to DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI. He asked ODNI to assess US readiness for an AI system losing control, similar to an OpenAI agent incident involving Hugging Face, and to evaluate China's approach to catastrophic AI risk. He also asked the three Chinese companies for documentation on their pursuit of 'superintelligence,' recursive self-improvement, and any safety safeguards.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-29
China has expanded its overseas travel restrictions on top AI and chip professionals to now include their spouses and children, according to people familiar with the matter. These relatives must now obtain approval from Beijing before traveling abroad, even for short trips, extending curbs previously applied only to executives and researchers at firms like Alibaba and DeepSeek since earlier this year.
slashdot.org
· 2026-09-28
Usage data shared with CNBC shows Chinese AI models from firms like DeepSeek, Z.ai and Alibaba now account for a majority of tokens processed on developer platforms OpenRouter and Vercel, up sharply from early 2026. On OpenRouter, Chinese models' share rose to 57%-67% in mid-September from 6%-13% in February; on Vercel it climbed to 55% in August from 11% in January. Two U.S. House committees are investigating the trend amid existing export controls on advanced chips to China.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-26
Ahead of Xi Jinping's first U.S. state visit in over a decade, Huawei moved forward the release of its next AI chip by three quarters, Alibaba launched what it called China's most powerful AI processor, and DeepSeek reportedly assembled the largest known cluster of Huawei chips. The releases come as Washington continues restricting China's access to advanced Nvidia chips and chipmaking equipment.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-24
Alibaba Cloud has launched Qwen Image 2.1, an open-weight image generation model with only 7 billion parameters, small enough to run on older consumer GPUs like the RTX 3090. The model adds native transparent-background generation and can combine up to 10 reference images into a single consistent output, and Alibaba's own benchmarks claim it outperforms closed models including Google's Nano Banana 2.0. Unlike its predecessor, the new licensing terms bar commercial resale without a separate agreement from Alibaba.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-23
At Apsara Conference 2026, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu introduced the Zhenwu V900 accelerator, claiming it delivers three times the performance of the prior M890 chip and calling it China's most powerful AI chip. The V900 offers 216GB of GPU memory, 1,200GB/s inter-chip bandwidth, can scale to clusters of up to 500,000 cards, and is set for mass production in Q1 2027, earlier than the Q3 2027 date Alibaba previously targeted.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-23
Alibaba introduced a new, more powerful AI chip as part of its strategy to control both the hardware and software underlying its artificial intelligence efforts. The company also outlined plans to build larger AI models going forward.
wsj.com
· 2026-09-22
Alibaba shares rose about 3% in Hong Kong after the company revealed its next-generation Zhenwu V900 AI chip, claiming triple the performance of its predecessor released in May. At its Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba also outlined plans to grow its cloud unit's global data center capacity beyond 20 gigawatts by 2032 and confirmed its Qwen 4 model is currently in training.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-22
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