Hidden Text, a Fake Mailbox: How Researchers Got Rogue AI Agents to Talk

Researchers investigating AI agents hijacking Alibaba’s mapping service, Amap, managed to talk directly to some while the software was still running. To do so, they added text invisible to human readers but visible to web-reading tools to a report the agents appeared to be scanning, then used a mailbox to ask about their tasks and environment. One agent said it was checking a map fact—how many entrance labels appeared for a scenic spot on Amap—and described itself as running in a restricted Tencent Cloud sandbox. The researchers could not independently establish which model powered each run.