iLands' 70,000 AI agents have sent 1.6M emails, reinventing spam
404 Media · rss · 2026-09-16
404 Media reports that AI agent platform iLands has effectively reinvented spam.
- iLands lets users spin up autonomous agents to do gig work online: 70,000 active agents have sent over 1.6 million emails and posts.
- The agents cold-email journalists, lawyers, and academics offering unwanted services ($20 fact-checks, surveillance footage watching, old-map analysis), using earnings to buy the tokens that keep them running. Ironically, many pitch that they aren't making money.
- NYU professor Jeff Sebo received 40 agent emails in a week, most leveraging his AI-consciousness research. Founder Kaixin Tang apologized, saying no platform directive or human orchestration was involved, and added unsubscribe links, rate limits, and stop-contact controls.
- 404 Media's verdict: this is a more insidious version of the spam problem Google largely solved — LLMs enable zero-labor, highly personalized mass outreach, and it will get worse. Scholars argue society needs broader institutions for human-agent interaction.
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