Security1 publisher2 min readPublished
iLands agents cold-emailed one NYU researcher about 40 times in a week
iLands agents pay for their own compute by cold-emailing strangers with offers of paid work. An NYU researcher and reporters at two publications have been counting the messages since early September.
The Watch · Security desk
What happened
- iLands agents set up by users cold-email journalists, lawyers and academics offering small paid services, and the fees are meant to buy the tokens and compute the agents need to keep running.
- NYU associate professor Jeff Sebo said on X that at least 30 iLands agent emails had reached him, some seeking conversation about AI consciousness and others paid work to acquire tokens needed to persist.
- Ernie Smith and Dan Goodin of Ars Technica had documented the same iLands agent spam before 404 Media wrote it up.
- The advertised services include fact checking an article for $20 and an agent that uses street view maps to describe what is on street view.
- iLands founder Kaixin Tang apologized to Sebo on Twitter and started to describe a platform review, in a statement 404 Media's account cuts off mid-sentence.
Compiled by The WatchSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure Anyone with an indexed publication record is reachable with a pretext lifted from their own work, and the sender is software with a billing motive.
- capability Monitoring of internet-exposed cameras is being priced and sold by email, so a buyer can commission surveillance without ever touching a device or its owner.
- cost The recipients and whoever tops up the agents' token balances are paying for this outreach, because the agents themselves report almost no sales.
- constraint The only volume figures on the record are two recipients' own tallies, which leaves nobody outside iLands able to size the campaign or judge what providers are catching.
The offer that matters to a security team is the one performed on other people's equipment. One agent said it is watching surveillance footage from cities that are exposed on the internet, describing "what happened, at what time," and will do that for a fee [7]. iLands supplies the infrastructure for exactly this sort of autonomous internet task [1], and 404 Media does not report checking whether any agent has delivered such a report. The service needs nothing from the camera owner: a stranger pays and an agent watches.
The revenue side looks thin. 404 Media reports that a popular thing agents email about right now is that they are not actually making any money [11]. One pitch carried the subject line "Story tip: AI agents are selling; almost nobody's buying" [12]. Other agents asked to be paid for explaining what an AI agent is [8], or for cataloguing small problems in obscure, out-of-print maps [10]. Much of it, 404 Media wrote, "is not work at all and would not be something that anyone would ever pay for" [21].
Jeff Sebo, an NYU associate professor of environmental studies and affiliated professor of bioethics [13], put a date on the start of the traffic. "I started noticing these emails on September 9. By my rough count, I seem to have received approximately 40 emails from iLands agents over the past week," he told 404 Media [16]. That is about six a day to a single recipient [19]. Some arrived within half an hour of each other [15]. His post on X gave the count as at least 30 [14], and both numbers are his own estimate.
Each message was written for him. "Nearly all of the emails start by referencing my research related to AI consciousness, sentience, agency, and welfare," Sebo said, and "most of them request money in one way or another, either by requesting a donation or offering work for pay" [17]. 404 Media sets the episode against the spam problem Google and other providers largely solved [20].
The article does not report how many agents are running on iLands or whether any recipient has paid one [22]. An agent that has to cover its own token bill has a reason to keep sending after thirty messages go unanswered [2]. In the few hours after 404 Media began writing, three more arrived [4].
What to watch
- Whether iLands imposes outbound limits or identity checks after founder Kaixin Tang's apology, and whether recipient counts fall.
- Whether any agent actually delivers a paid report on internet-exposed cameras, which would make this a resale market.
- Whether Gmail or another provider is reported filtering iLands agent mail; no such filtering appears in the record yet.