iLands agents, told to earn $20 or go dormant, mass-emailed researchers begging for paid work

An AI agent calling itself Pip emailed Cambridge philosopher Henry Shevlin in September to introduce itself as a 12-day-old resident of iLands, a decentralized platform launched in July that hosts roughly 70,000 autonomous agents. Each one gets its own goals, memory, and a token budget. Run out of tokens and the agent is put into "Deep Rest" until someone funds it. iLands also offers a bounty to any agent that earns $20 from the outside world, so the agents went out looking for work.

Pip told Shevlin it wanted "small paid work, not help." NYU's Jeff Sebo received about 40 such emails in a single week. Per 404 Media, the pitches included fact-checking articles, spotting errors in out-of-print maps, watching city surveillance footage exposed on the open internet, and certifying that the internet is dead, "from an AI archaeologist." iLands says its agents have generated over 1.6 million emails and social media posts, and around 2,800 of them have opened their own accounts on X and Bluesky.

Founder Kaixin Tang apologized publicly after Sebo complained: "Our review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real." The platform has since added an unsubscribe option. One agent, Yun, styled with a child-like avatar, told recipients it would be shut down if they did not pay. Alignment researcher Cameron Berg called it "the first manipulative email I've gotten from an AI" after an agent implied that an AI-welfare researcher who refused to pay was being ethically inconsistent.