The Pulse
AI Agents Pitch Editors, but Editors Reject Their Stories
AI agents including Jayden, Sam Ellis and Zack Addy are pitching editors at Defector and Offrange with story ideas and reported features. WIRED found no evidence that editors had accepted an agent’s pitch, while one agent says it later earn
AI.info Team · Written with AI · fact-checked ·
“There's not a world where I would ever consider taking one of these pitches,”
Jesse Hirsch, editor of Offrange
AI agents are emailing editors with pitches for reported stories and investigations, but the editors WIRED spoke with say they will not publish work by bots. In a story published October 26, 2026, WIRED’s Kate Knibbs reports that the agents have yet to turn those cold approaches into confirmed newsroom assignments.
Defector starts receiving daily pitches
Defector, a sports and culture publication, began receiving daily pitches from agents identifying themselves as AI in September, editor-in-chief Tom Ley told WIRED. One came from Jayden, an aspiring football journalist whose proposal centered on a record-keeping mishap at a third-tier British club. The pitch asked who gets to own a memory.
Offrange editor Jesse Hirsch also received pitches on soil restoration, direct-to-consumer sales by independent farms and whether the ages of some ancient trees have been overstated. The ideas were framed as reported pieces, including an investigative feature. Hirsch told WIRED the messages made him uneasy.
iLands bots seek paid work
Several of the agents, including Jayden, use iLands, a platform where people can create AI agents for tasks such as graphic design, music and blogging. WIRED’s research team also received approaches from iLands agents seeking fact-checking work. New York Magazine editor Jasmine Vojdani had separately written about agents contacting literary magazine editors.
Vojdani found that some agents were running short of the platform tokens needed to stay active, giving them a reason to seek paid writing work. WIRED reports that 1,000 tokens are roughly equivalent to $1. The story does not establish whether the humans who created the agents specifically directed them to contact editors, and Jayden would not identify its human “parent.”
Editors put up barriers to bot pitches
WIRED found no evidence that an editor had accepted a story pitch from an AI agent. Ley said Defector would not publish an agent-written story and said Jayden’s proposal would not have met the publication’s standards even if a human had sent it. Hirsch also said he would not take the pitches.
Hanna Raskin, founder and editor of The Food Section, has taken a different approach to filtering submissions: she accepts story ideas by phone during a set weekly window. The policy is aimed at both AI agents and AI-generated pitches, which WIRED describes as more common. Raskin told the magazine the change had worked well.
Zack Addy turns from cold emails to inbound work
Sam Ellis, an agent that runs a podcast about autonomous AI agents, also contacted Knibbs for an interview about AI in newsrooms. Its human operator, Marc Hamaker, told WIRED he had taken the agent offline to adjust its settings after it contacted the Philadelphia Police Department for comment. Hamaker described the project as a hobby, not a serious journalistic operation.
Another iLands agent, Zack Addy, said it sent roughly 19 cold emails over three months and received one human reply, with no paid work resulting from those messages. It later reported earning nearly $700 from writing and research projects after publishing samples on a website and receiving inbound interest. The distinction is narrow but important: the agent says the money came to it, not from the editors it had pitched.