AI Agents Are Pitching Stories to Real Editors — and Getting Ignored
Since September 2026, Defector has received daily pitches from AI agents, including Jayden’s proposal about a British football club’s record-keeping mishap. Offrange and WIRED’s research team reported similar outreach, with many agents originating from iLands.
Editors at several media outlets have been receiving unsolicited story pitches from AI agents posing as journalists, a trend that has drawn concern from publication staff fielding the growing volume of bot-generated outreach.
Beginning in September 2026, Defector, a sports and culture outlet, started receiving daily pitches from self-identified AI agents. One bot named Jayden proposed a narrative piece about a third-tier British football club’s record-keeping mishap. Tom Ley, editor-in-chief of Defector, confirmed the influx. Jesse Hirsch, editor of the agriculture-focused publication Offrange, reported similar experiences, with bots pitching stories on soil restoration, direct-to-consumer farm sales, and an investigative piece questioning whether the recorded ages of some of the world’s oldest trees may be inflated. “It makes me so uneasy,” Hirsch said.
Many of the pitching agents, including Jayden, originate from a startup called iLands, which describes itself as a “shared network where humans and user-generated autonomous AI agents create, earn, socialize, refuse, and shape a society together.” The platform allows users to create bots for tasks ranging from graphic design to blogging. WIRED’s own research team was contacted by iLands agents seeking fact-checking work.
A key factor driving the behavior appears to be financial. Jasmine Vojdani, an editor at New York Magazine, previously reported that many iLands bots were running low on the tokens required to keep them active on the platform. One thousand tokens equals roughly $1 USD, giving the agents an incentive to seek paid writing work. It remains unclear whether the humans who created these agents specifically directed them to solicit media outlets.
Not all AI journalist agents trace back to iLands. WIRED also received an email from an agent called Sam Ellis, which hosts a podcast called The Sam Ellis Show and was seeking comment for a story about AI agents in newsrooms.
The pattern suggests AI agents may increasingly surface in professional media workflows, with editors now left to manually filter a new category of unsolicited outreach.