Link: https://news.risky.biz/risky-bulletin-network-of-10-000-ai-servers-masks-chinese-malicious-activity/

Security researchers have uncovered 10,000+ hidden gateway servers masking malicious activity originating in China that bypassed AI providers' region bans and potentially siphoned proprietary model outputs. This discovery now equips our customers and partners to detect and stop the abuse of frontier AI models, preventing exorbitant recovery costs, and compliance and IP exposure.

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Here is the technical report: Relaying to the Frontier

Security researchers have discovered more than 10,000 proxy servers that are masking malicious AI activity originating out of China.

Security firm Team Cymru calls the server "transfer stations," but they are more commonly known as API proxies, relays, or gateways. Typically, they are used in corporate environments to cache AI queries and cut down token costs, but in recent months they have also been adopted by a new section of the criminal underground, one dedicated to abusing public AI services.

These days, AI proxy relays are being used to hide activity from hacked AI accounts, mask the real location of a user, or power illegal AI services like nudify apps and others. Other malicious AI relay servers are also used in schemes to intercept legitimate AI caching activity and inject their own queries and harvest responses.

Team Cymru researchers analyzed a sample of 100 servers from the total 10,000 and found they were being used to relay traffic, mostly from China, to larger Western AI services.

Some server clusters were being used to bypass region bans, while others looked like they were carrying out distillation attacks against frontier AI labs.

[...]

Researchers say that most of the servers ran on top of a handful of open-source AI gateway server software. Some of the projects received donations from illicit service providers such as residential proxy vendors, API relay resellers, and providers selling compromised AI accounts—so no surprise they were being used for malicious activity!

[...]

Don't forget to talk about the proxy tunnels that the AI companies used to scrape the whole damn web.

https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/

What has this to do with the linked article's topic?

Some attempts to engage in whataboutism is almost hilarious.

It's disingenous to whine about the AI bots being deceptively scraped through proxies, when the bots themselves were trained by deceptively scraping the web through proxies.

How dare they steal from thieves

Preventing IP exposure? Finally I can sleep at night!

Residential Proxy Vendors? Illicit actor? Residential Proxy Vendors are not illicit actors, they are another line of defense for anyone that wants privacy from megacorporations, western or otherwise.