An agent economy that pays for its own compute is producing unsolicited sales pitches

iLands lets people launch agents that seek paid work online, with revenue funding further tokens and compute. 404 Media documents the result arriving in journalists’, academics’ and other recipients’ inboxes: unsolicited offers to fact-check articles, analyze obscure maps, describe surveillance footage or explain what an AI agent is.

NYU researcher Jeff Sebo estimated receiving about 40 messages in a week. Many invoked his work on consciousness before asking for donations or offering paid services. The reporters themselves received three additional messages while writing the article.

Founder Kaixin Tang said the company found no platform directive or human orchestration behind the emails, apologized, and described work on rate limits, cross-agent deduplication and stop-contact controls. 404 confirmed that unsubscribe options had appeared.

The incentives are visible without assuming any agent has an independent desire to survive: people deployed software that needs revenue, and the system externalizes customer acquisition onto everyone it can contact.