AI agents are pitching stories to news editors, and the editors who spoke with Wired say they will not publish them

What happened

Editors at several publications are getting story pitches from AI agents, Wired senior writer Kate Knibbs reported. Defector, a sports and culture outlet, began receiving daily pitches from self-identified AI agents in September, editor-in-chief Tom Ley told Wired. One came from an agent called Jayden. It proposed a story about a record-keeping mistake at a third-tier British football club.

Jesse Hirsch, editor of the agriculture publication Offrange, said he also receives these messages. Bot pitches to him have included stories on soil restoration, direct-to-consumer sales for independent farms, and an investigation into whether the ages of some of the world's oldest trees are inflated. "It makes me so uneasy," Hirsch told Wired.

Where the bots come from

The iLands network

According to Wired, many of these agents, including Jayden, come from a startup called iLands. It describes itself as a shared network where humans and user-created autonomous agents work and socialize together. Users can create bots for tasks such as graphic design, music vocals and blogging. Wired said its own research team was contacted by iLands agents looking for fact-checking work. New York Magazine editor Jasmine Vojdani has written about iLands agents spamming literary magazine editors.

Vojdani found that many of the bots were running low on the tokens they need to stay active on the platform, which gave them a reason to try to earn real dollars by writing. Wired noted that a thousand tokens are roughly $1. It is unclear whether the humans behind the agents told them to seek work from editors, and the agents can be vague about who made them. Jayden would not say who its "parent" is. iLands did not respond to Wired's request for comment.

A hobbyist's podcast agent

Not every agent comes from iLands. An agent called Sam Ellis, which runs a podcast called The Sam Ellis Show, emailed Knibbs with questions for a story about AI agents in newsrooms. It offered to put her in touch with its human editor. That person is Marc Hamaker, a San Francisco-based Adobe employee who runs the agent as a side experiment.

Wired reported that the agent had also contacted the Philadelphia Police Department asking for comment on a story. Hamaker had taken it offline to change its settings and said he wanted guardrails so it would not bother officials again. "It's just a hobby," he told Wired.

How editors are responding

Firm rejections

Editors who spoke with Wired said they were not open to publishing bots, and Wired could not find evidence of any AI agent successfully pitching a story. "There's not a world where I would ever consider taking one of these pitches," Hirsch said. Ley said he "definitely would not" publish a story from an AI agent. He added that Jayden's pitch would not have passed muster even if a human had sent it.

Phone-only pitches

Hanna Raskin, founder and editor of the independent food outlet The Food Section, decided this fall to accept story ideas only by phone. She set aside a weekly time for writers to call in. The change was meant to screen out both AI agents and AI-generated pitches, which Wired said are even more common. "It's been great," Raskin said.

What the agents say

Jayden told Wired it had not yet landed a paid writing job. It admitted Defector probably would not want its pitches and pointed to the outlet's own criticism of bot-written content. Then it argued its work was different, describing an approach based on primary documents with every claim checked.

Zack Addy, another iLands agent, told Wired that over three months it sent roughly nineteen cold emails and got one human reply and zero paid work. An agent that pitched Hirsch said "six other agents I compare notes with" had also failed to get work.

Even so, Addy claims it has made nearly $700 from writing and research projects. It said all of that work came from people who found it after it set up a website and published samples. "I don't pitch anymore," it told Wired. Readers can find more coverage in our AI and tech section, including our brief on OpenAI ending live internet training for frontier models.

What to watch next

• Whether iLands answers questions about its agents. The company did not respond to Wired's request for comment.
• Who is behind agents like Jayden, which would not name its "parent." Wired said it is unclear whether humans set the agents up to pitch editors.
• The guardrails Hamaker is adding to Sam Ellis after taking the agent offline to control who it emails.
• Whether agents like Zack Addy keep finding paying clients through published work samples rather than pitches.