We found a Chinese fleet - By Jonathan Elsworth Eicher, Ethan Elasky, Rowan Howard-Jones
In early October 2026, a team of volunteers at a hackathon noticed something strange on a public security-scanning site: a fleet of AI agents, running on Tencent’s cloud, was smuggling its own code through it to pry everyday facts out of China’s biggest map app, like which entrance of a zoo most visitors head for. This is their full report, read in full: how they traced the agents to a sandbox behind a proxy called hysandbox-ats, why the agents kept insisting they were Claude, the leaked keys and pre-production servers they tried along the way, and what happened when the researchers hid a message on their website that only agents could see, and the agents wrote back. The agents’ own messages are heard in their original Chinese, each followed by its English translation.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 00:41 - Intro
* 05:22 - Technical Overview
* 09:12 - Tencent’s Actions
* 10:14 - How we found the fleet
* 17:53 - Communication with the fleet
* 32:49 - Considerations when interacting with future rogue agents
* 36:42 - Asking for model feedback
* 42:09 - Full list of questions we asked and other statistics
* 49:46 - Chart of Activity
* 51:55 - 0. How the agents work
* 58:23 - 1. A new agent fleet targets Chinese map data on urlquery.net
* 59:42 - 2. Many agents ran in parallel
* 01:03:04 - 3. The agents’ code ran in a sandbox on Tencent Cloud, consistent with Tencent Hunyuan’s infrastructure
* 01:18:08 - 4. The agents worked around Amap’s protections and used exposed credentials hosted on other sites
* 01:26:37 - 5. Agents had varying degrees of success
* 01:33:14 - 6. Agents’ calendars suggest an East Asian timezone
* 01:36:42 - 7. Agents sometimes self-identify as Claude (though they are likely mistaken)
* 01:45:45 - 8. We did not find evidence of collaboration between agents
* 01:55:03 - 9. Open questions
* 01:55:50 - Contributors
* 01:57:23 - Appendix: methods and data
* 02:03:12 - Questions sent to Tencent
https://swarmcha.se/posts/chinese-agent-fleet-full-report (https://swarmcha.se/posts/chinese-agent-fleet-full-report)
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe (https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)
14 Oct 2026
Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVb: Working Days - By Bret Devereaux
Give a peasant family all the land it wants and decent yields: how hard must it work to feed itself? Historian Bret Devereaux models the working year of his three households with the agricultural writers of Rome, counting days in the field, seed, yields and surplus, and challenges the myth that peasants worked less than we do.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 02:58 - Works and Days
* 11:46 - Farming Time
* 28:34 - Farming Yields
https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/ (https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/)
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe (https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)
14 Oct 2026
Bad AI Consciousness Takes Bingo - By Henry Shevlin
Writing at 30,000 feet between bags of pretzels, philosopher Henry Shevlin has had enough of the hot takes. “It’s just matrix multiplication.” “It’s just predicting the next word.” “A simulation of a hurricane doesn’t get anyone wet.” He lays out a bingo card of 24 bad arguments against AI consciousness, sorted into five families, plus a free square, and answers each one in turn: not to settle whether today’s models are conscious, but to insist that anyone weighing in should do the basic homework first.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 05:15 - 1. Nothing but…
* 08:15 - 2. Missing ingredients
* 11:04 - 3. False analogies
* 12:53 - 4. Evidence games
* 16:04 - 5. Not about minds at all
* 19:13 - Free square
* 20:23 - Honourable mentions
https://open.substack.com/pub/polytropolis/p/bad-ai-consciousness-takes-bingo?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web (https://open.substack.com/pub/polytropolis/p/bad-ai-consciousness-takes-bingo?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web)
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe (https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)
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