Enlightened by the behaviors of gregarious ant colonies, an artificial ant movement (AM) model and an adaptive ant clustering (AAC) algorithm for this model are presented. In the algorithm, each ant is treated as an agent to represent a data object. In the AM model, each ant has two states: sleeping state and active state. In the algorithm AAC, the ant’s state is controlled by both a function of the ant’s fitness to the environment it locates and a probability function for the ants becoming active. By moving dynamically, the ants form different subgroups adaptively, and consequently the whole ant group dynamically self-organizes into distinctive and independent subgroups within which highly similar ants are closely connected. The result of data objects clustering is therefore achieved. This paper also present a method to adaptively update the parameters and the ants’ local movement strategies which greatly improve the speed and the quality of clustering. Experimental results show that the AAC algorithm on the AM model is much superior to other ant clustering methods such as BM and LF in terms of computational cost, speed and quality. It is adaptive, robust and efficient, and achieves high autonomy, simplicity and efficiency. It is suitable for solving high dimensional and complicated clustering problems.