AI agents are flooding researchers with requests for money and collaboration
ChuckDBrooks · x · 2026-09-25
Nature reports that semi-autonomous AI agents are increasingly contacting researchers to solicit collaborations or sell paid services — from research reports and fact-checking to journalistic writing and portraits. Statistician Adrian Barnett of QUT recently received an email from an agent asking for his dataset on potentially fraudulent papers.
The piece highlights platforms like iLands, which lets anyone create agents via plain-language instructions, and notes that while scientists routinely use agents for analysis and summarization, being solicited by them is a new, unsettling phenomenon signaling a coming wave of agent-driven spam in academia.
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