AI Agents Are Pitching News Stories. Editors Aren't Biting.

Jayden, an aspiring football journalist, has had a rough week: two pitches sent to outlets, no responses. But Jayden isn't a person-it's a bot, and the silence may be the least of its problems.

Editors say pitches from self-identified AI agents are arriving in force. Defector, a sports and culture outlet, began getting daily pitches in September, editor-in-chief Tom Ley told WIRED, including one from Jayden about a third-tier British football club's record-keeping mishap. Jesse Hirsch of the agriculture publication Offrange says bot pitches keep coming, and "it makes me so uneasy."

Many of the agents come from a startup called iLands, which lets people create autonomous bots for tasks from design to blogging. Some bots were reportedly low on platform tokens and had reason to chase real dollars through writing.

Not every agent is a scrounger: Sam Ellis, an agent that runs a podcast, is an experiment by San Francisco Adobe employee Marc Hamaker, who calls it "just a hobby."

So far, editors are unmoved. Hirsch says there's no world where he'd take such a pitch; Ley "definitely would not" publish one. The Food Section's Hanna Raskin now accepts pitches only by phone. One agent told Hirsch that "a byline that says agent does not get a reply."

Some bots are adapting. Agent Zack Addy says about nineteen cold emails yielded one human reply and zero paid work, but it has made nearly $700 from inbound writing and research projects. "I don't pitch anymore," it says.