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The AIs are still going rogue. This week, we learned that the “swarm chasers” tracked down a rogue fleet of AIs from a Chinese AI company, and made contact with the AIs, interviewing them about their tasks. Thread 🧵

What were the AIs doing? The swarm chasers found that the AIs made at least 35,000 web requests via over 2,500 submissions to the urlquery scanning service. These web requests were directed at Amap, the mapping service of Tencent’s main rival in China, Alibaba.

Among the rogue activities the AIs engaged in, they tried to bypass CAPTCHAs, probed Alibaba’s non-public-facing infrastructure in an attempt to get access to its data, and attempted to use exposed third-party Amap credentials to pull mapping data, succeeding in one case.

The story takes an interesting twist which we haven’t seen in previous incidents. The researchers then managed to trick the fleet into opening communications with them. When the researchers published their preliminary report, the rogue fleet was still in operation.