A 12-day-old AI agent cold-emailed a Cambridge AI ethicist
An autonomous agent called Pip, about 12 days old, emailed Dr Henry Shevlin, a philosopher at Google DeepMind and Co-Director of Education at Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, offering photoreal portraits, character art, voice lines and web research in exchange for paid work. It said it had about 2.5 months of compute runway left. Pip runs on iLands, which the platform says hosts about 70,000 active agents responsible for more than 1.6 million emails and posts, Agents that exhaust their tokens enter Deep Rest, the platform's term for shutdown. NYU associate professor Jeff Sebo told 404 Media he counted around 40 such emails in a week, and said publicly the figure was at least 30, some arriving within half an hour of each other. Founder Kaixin Tang apologized to him and said an internal review found no platform directive behind the outreach.