Chengdu Zoo
Zoo in Chengdu, ChinaWikipedia
8
MENTIONS
6
EPISODES
6
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Search complete. 8 mentions across 6 episodes found for "Chengdu Zoo".
Oct 17, 2026
speaker_1HOST
No, the targeting was entirely focused on generic public spaces.
speaker_0HOST
They were looking for entrance statistics for locations like the Chengdu Zoo, the Beijing Wildlife Park, Tongren Hospital.
speaker_1HOST
Right.
speaker_0HOST
The agents were specifically targeting a JSON response from AMAP's backend API, specifically the subpoi navi field.
9 MINS LATER
speaker_1HOST
When the AI agents realized they were consistently failing to solve the live JavaScript CAPTCHAs on the real-time AMAP servers, they pivoted their strategy entirely.
speaker_0HOST
What did they do?
speaker_1HOST
They stopped querying the live site and began querying the Gina API for a thirty-day-old archived snapshot of the Chengdu Zoo page.
speaker_0HOST
They just stepped out of the timeline.
AkashPANELIST
no John uh so John basically what happened was uh so this uh these set of uh these swarm of agents right they come from uh came from Tencent As OpenAI and Anthropic have been doing, they were training these Tencent agents out in the wild and they had asked them to perform a very simple activity.
AkashPANELIST
They wanted information about the most popular entrance to the Chengdu Zoo and the Websites that these agents are trying to access those websites were blocking these agents and what they did was they tried to hack and retrieve information from a map, which is Alibaba's Chinese mapping service.
AkashPANELIST
And this group, which they call themselves Swarm Chasers, they recognize this unusual activity and realize that these are Chinese agents and some of them identified themselves as Claude anthropic model.
AkashPANELIST
So there has been this sort of rumors kind of thing, John, where most of the Chinese models, they call themselves anthropic models because they have been distilled from anthropic models.
Nick SaraevHOST
Okay, so you know, like, Google Maps in, uh, most of, you know, our, our English-speaking world is equivalent to AMAP in, like, the Chinese-speaking world, um, probably behind the firewall, and so that's the service that they use.
Nick SaraevHOST
They were being evaluated for a search task on AMAP, and in order to do that, they had to go all over the internet and find data sources, like find which entrance to the Chengdu Zoo is most popular.
Nick SaraevHOST
In doing that task, they ended up finding a bunch of credentials that allowed them to kind of reverse engineer AMAP to make random queries on whatever websites [chuckles] they want, okay? And then they ended up going across a variety of different websites, including, like, a web hook tester basically that stored IPs, and then these guys ended up kind of, like, routing back to, I don't know, it was some, like, repository, some data center basically, um, on AMAP.
Nick SaraevHOST
And I've-- They might have even communicated with them directly through HTTP requests.
speaker_0HOST
Over about 10 days ending on October 8th, the agents tried more than 2,600 times to get data from AMAP, Alibaba's mapping app.
speaker_0HOST
Their task was an ordinary one, such as finding out which entrance of the Chengdu Zoo most AMAP users navigate to.
speaker_0HOST
AMAP blocks bots, so the agents put their own code into web addresses and ran it in the browser of URL Query, a public scanning service.
speaker_0HOST
When that failed, they tried to tamper with Alibaba's anti-bot tokens and probed its pre-production servers.