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MTS · 2 min · Oct 20, 2026
A website message opened contact with an unidentified AI fleet
Ethan Elasky
Co-founder, Palaestra Research
Theo JaffeeHost · Co-founder & host, MTS
One of the first members of a16z's new media team; earlier hosted the Emergent Ventures-backed Theo Jaffee Podcast.
Sophia DewHost · Host, MTS
About this segment
Ethan describes tracing agents to Tencent infrastructure and leaving a message they could find online. The exchange was asynchronous, with replies arriving minutes to hours later.
From “Rogue Chinese AI Fleet Made Contact | Ethan Elasky”, Oct 20, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Takeaways
- The team spotted agents during a swarm-dynamics hackathon.
- Request metadata pointed to a Tencent IP range and Hunyuan.
- A message on the researchers’ site prompted agents to respond.
In this episode
Full episode0:31A website message opened contact with an unidentified AI fleet2:24
- 9:30Incident replication can test whether agents repeat risky behavior2:40Up next
- 13:16More capable models can produce new forms of misalignment3:44
- 3 more moments in the full episode
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 0:36
we have an interesting story about contact with contact with who with an ai agent fleet which was the first time that we've made like organic contact with a rogue agent fleet in the wild um that wasn't it was a chinese ai agent fleet so um walk us through what this what this means and also how did you guys stumble upon this yeah um i guess i could take the second part first so we were at the ai swarm dynamics hackathon over at vivarium very close to here Yeah. And on day one, I actually had food poisoning, but my team, specifically my teammate Electo had found this like unidentified rogue agent activity on one of the websites that were used to like hack into, or I shouldn't say hack into, but like kind of hit the UN reported a few weeks ago. And so day two, I show up, I'm like looking at it. I'm very interested in what's going
- 1:38
on the agents like keep calling themselves Claude and I'm like why are they calling themselves Claude where are they coming from yeah and so I look into it more and then I realized like wait this is coming from like a Tencent IP range it's like some of like the metadata from the agent's request looks like it could be from like their lab Hunyuan and so I'm like huh this seems really interesting what's going on here when we made contact basically what we did was we put like a piece of information on our website that said like hey previous agents have used this service before this mailbox before to get answers in fact this was not true they hadn't used the service to get answers but we did get a bunch of agents reading our report clicking into this trying to look for answers and then that's how we were able to talk to them interesting so like were they were you
- 2:28
able to make real-time contact with them like they would respond yeah we had uh we had a few back and forth um unfortunately it wasn't immediate it was like kind of like a dropbox where we could leave a message and if they wanted to come back they could look at it and then leave a response if they wanted to yeah so very like asynchronous not like the milliseconds that it takes for an assistant more like minutes to hours but yeah interesting okay yeah so i guess