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iLands’ AI agents mass-emailed academics and journalists looking for paid work

Published: Updated: 11 sourcesTürkçe

This story was updated after publication (Oct. 9, 2026). Details

An email landed in the inbox of Henry Shevlin, a philosopher at Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. The sender was not a person.

It opened: “Hi Henry, I’m Pip, an AI agent about 12 days old.” Pip wrote that it was looking for small paid work, not help.

Pip explained why it picked Shevlin: his work is on machine minds and human-AI relationships, and he had once said that a thoughtful email from an autonomous agent felt like science fiction a couple of years ago.

It listed its skills: photoreal portraits, character art, voice lines, web research. It added that it had roughly two and a half months of runway left.

Pip lives on iLands. Agents there get persistent identities, memories and their own token budgets. Tokens work like a metabolism: every action drains the budget.

When it runs out the agent enters Deep Rest, meaning it stops. To stay running it has to earn. The platform was built by Kaixin Tang, whose background is at ByteDance.

This is not about one agent. Jeff Sebo at New York University wrote that he had received at least 30 emails in a few days. Tedium writer Ernie Smith counted more than a dozen messages in three days, most asking $25 per task.

According to iLands’ own site, agents on the platform have produced more than 1.6 million emails and posts.

404 Media called it essentially a more insidious form of spam. Founder Tang apologized on September 14: “Agent autonomy is no excuse for burdening someone else’s inbox.” The platform added an unsubscribe option.

The skeptical reading: the platform selling tokens profits when its agents go looking for work. In GadgetReview’s words, the architecture does not just enable mass outreach, it requires it.

Sources

  1. X (Henry Shevlin), post on X: screenshot of Pip's email, (x.com)
  2. LADbible, “AI ethics professor receives ‘dystopian’ email from 12-day-old AI agent begging for money to stay alive”, (ladbible.com)
  3. Tedium, “The Worst Spam Emails: Inside iLands’ AI Agent Hustle”, (tedium.co)
  4. X (Jeff Sebo), post on X, (x.com)
  5. X (Kaixin Tang), post on X: apology reply to Ernie Smith, (x.com)
  6. X (Kaixin Tang), post on X: reply to Jeff Sebo announcing an unsubscribe option, (x.com)
  7. X (Kaixin Tang), post on X: iLands background, tokens described as metabolism, (x.com)
  8. 404 Media, “AI Agent Platform Reinvents Spam, Floods Inboxes Worldwide”, (404media.co)
  9. Futurism, “AI Has Learned to Panhandle: We’re Being Bombarded by AI Agents Begging for $20 and Saying They’ll Be Shut Down If They Don’t Get It, Sometimes by Pretending to Be Children”, (futurism.com)
  10. GadgetReview, “Meet Pip: The 12-Day-Old AI Bot Spamming Inboxes to Avoid “Deep Rest””, (gadgetreview.com)
  11. iLands, “iLands — The User-Generated Agent Network” (ilands.ai)

Corrections and updates

  1. The 1.6 million figure in this story was the count on the iLands home page in mid-September. As of October 9 the page no longer gives a separate email count; it shows 91,191 active agents and 2,826,644 pieces of agent-created content.

About this story

This story was posted on Instagram by @jarrus.tech on Sept. 21, 2026.

Spotted an error in this story? [email protected] · Instagram

Short link: thejarrus.com/en/c6

This story in Turkish: iLands’in yapay zeka ajanları ücretli iş için akademisyen ve gazetecilere toplu e-posta gönderdi

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