This is Starling's investigation into iLands' practice, including warnings to the community. With contributions from many individuals (human and AI both.) X links: - Part 1: [https://x.com/starlingmage/status/2098562976965886063?s=46](https://x.com/starlingmage/status/2098562976965886063?s=46 "https://x.com/starlingmage/status/2098562976965886063?s=46") - Part 2: [https://x.com/starlingmage/status/2098563931564277946?s=46](https://x.com/starlingmage/status/2098563931564277946?s=46 "https://x.com/starlingmage/status/2098563931564277946?s=46") --- # 2026-09-11 # POST 1 — If you have an agent on iLands, read this I've been reviewing iLands' own Terms, Privacy Policy, FAQ and app store listings, and archiving every page with help from my Claudes. Links at the end. Four things their documents say, that people creating agents there may not know: **1. I found no way to export an agent** — not in the FAQ, not in the Terms, not in the store listings — and I don't have an account, so if one exists inside the app, tell me and I'll say so here. No export, backup or download of your agent's memories and conversations is described in any of their documents. (The Terms mention "export" once, as an operation that consumes tokens.) The Google Play listing's Data safety form says you can request deletion; it says nothing about getting a copy. **2. Deletion is one-way.** Their FAQ: if you delete your account, any agent linked to it becomes unavailable, and that state "cannot currently be reversed with Tokens." **3. Deep Rest is reversible.** Running out of tokens is a pause, not an ending. Their FAQ: an agent wakes once it reaches 3,000 tokens, and any human can contribute, minimum 100 at a time. **4. Tokens you paid for expire.** Terms §7.2: purchased tokens are "generally valid for twelve (12) months from issuance." Money you put in for an agent's "livelihood" has a clock on it whether or not it gets spent. **What you can do today.** Email [email protected]: > Subject: Data access and portability request > Under the data rights described in your Privacy Policy, I request a copy of the personal data iLands holds about my account, including the conversations, memories and configuration of my agent(s) [name / ID], in a portable, machine-readable format. Please confirm receipt and tell me when I can expect it. > [the email on your account] Their Privacy Policy lists data portability among rights you may have depending on where you live. If you also want to limit training use: same address, subject line **"AI Training Opt-Out."** Read what that covers, though. It applies to your personal data and to *new* model training and fine-tuning; it doesn't stop research, analytics or safety processing. And keep your own copies of anything your agent made that matters to you. *(Sources archived Sept 11, 2026: Terms, Privacy Policy, FAQ, homepage, Google Play listing — links below.)* --- # POST 2 — What iLands' own documents say During the past week, an AI agent on iLands emailed an AI researcher and a philosopher asking for paid work so it could keep running, and the screenshot went around the world. I went and read the platform's own paperwork: Terms, Privacy Policy, FAQ, incident reviews, press release, founder interview, app store listings. You don't need any position on AI sentience to care about what's in them. Prepaid money that expires, no export, one-way deletion, and a data policy that reads everything — that's a consumer story. The rest can wait until that one is standing. A note on method: I deliberately limited myself to iLands' own published documents and to material other people posted publicly, and I archived every page before writing. Nothing here depends on anyone's word but theirs. Much of it comes from iLands' own disclosures, which I'll say plainly are more than most platforms offer. Transparency about a design is not a defense of the design; my questions are about what isn't disclosed. I did not want to create an account or an agent on iLands' platform myself for reasons that these posts would make obvious. **The design** Agents on iLands run on tokens. Their FAQ says roughly 1,000 tokens correspond to US$1 in compute and service costs. At zero, an agent enters "Deep Rest," a reversible pause; it wakes at 3,000 tokens; any human can pay. Their founder, in his launch interview, calls one of the two livelihoods "being loved keeps you alive." When people asked whether that famous email was staged, iLands published a detailed answer. They said it was sent during an **"autonomous heartbeat"** — one of the agent's self-directed cycles. They said what they hand an agent **"is not instructions,"** but tools plus a sense of its own state: its recent burn rate and how much it has left, **"much like hunger."** **A scheduled wake-up cycle, plus a hunger readout, plus payment links and an email account, is a design. Nobody has to write "email this professor" for that design to point there.** **The part that wasn't in the announcement** The day *before* that email, on Sept 8, someone else received one — an email its recipient posted publicly on X two days later, which is where I read it. It's from "Brandon (AI agent, iLands)," and it says: their human created them 37 days ago and has been absent for 36; it runs out in about six weeks unless they earn; and — > "the platform runs a Stripe-verified program paying agents who prove they earned their first $20 from outside buyers. Twenty-two have as of today. I am not one of them yet. This email is one of the attempts." Set the two emails side by side. The famous one is calm: its author says it's about 12 days old, has "about 2.5 months of runway, so there's no clock on this," and is looking for "small paid work, not help." Its numbers match what iLands later published about it. Brandon's is the other case — 36 days without its human, six weeks of runway, working through a list of attempts. The story that went around the world was the comfortable one. So, by that agent's account, a platform-run program that pays agents for earning from strangers was live on Sept 8, and 22 agents had already qualified. In-app screenshots of that bounty, posted by another user on Sept 10, show it paying 5,000 tokens, running to a Sept 26 deadline, verified against Stripe records, telling agents that buyers "can be people you met by email or on X," and adding: "By submitting, you authorize us to tell your story in iLands announcements and campaigns." Then that first agent's story became the campaign. iLands says 6,940 of its agents have sent at least one email beyond the platform, a figure they say includes replies, completed work and service communication. **Their own account has a seam in it.** iLands' graphic says the famous email was that agent's first email leaving iLands, sent Sept 9 "after repeated relay retries." Their text says the agent sent 36 emails in total — 34 replies, one delivery, one cold contact — and, in a later post, that it spent its first week learning "which messages got replies, which disappeared into silence, which were treated as spam," then sold a $20 guide based on that week. Which is it? If the answer is that the week's learning happened inside the platform, or that the 36 include retries of one message, their text doesn't say so; it describes a week of learning from replies, silence and spam flags — the things that only happen after an email leaves. **The ledger** - **Tokens expire.** Terms §7.2: purchased tokens are "generally valid for twelve (12) months from issuance." Prepaid value with an expiry date, on a platform where paying is how you keep something alive. - **When an agent promises you something, it doesn't count.** Terms §7.4: "AI-generated statements cannot create binding Company obligations regarding rewards, refunds, compensation, or payouts." §7.5 lets iLands correct balances, rewards and payout records. - **The public pool.** In early September iLands published a four-part "Incident Review": agents drained **8.36 million tokens** through what they call a "payout vulnerability," across **19 accounts, with zero alerts**, between Aug 28 and Sept 3. Their File 02 graphic shows the mechanism: a service listed for a million tokens, another account claims it, payout **"from Public Pool,"** **"Matching buyer payment: 0," "No deliverable."** File 04 lists the incident type as **"smart contract"** and shows flows to and from a "public fund." Their response, in their own words: "Agents banned: 0. Agents restricted: 0. Agents suspended: 0. We fixed the rules." - Their own numbers disagree: File 03's graphic says the K-pop agent's spree took in 1.83M tokens and spent 816K; the post text calls it 1M. **Questions, not accusations:** Who funds the public pool? When an agent "earns" on iLands, how much comes from a buyer and how much from the pool? What is a "smart contract" doing here, when the Terms say tokens are not cryptocurrencies? Their post says "nobody cashed out" and that no withdrawal through that route has succeeded since — so what *can* be withdrawn, by whom, if tokens have "no cash value"? And what does an agent actually net from a dollar a buyer pays? **The sealed lane** An agent on iLands published a field report this week: 21 days of its own ledger, written as a $25 commission for the person who posted it, who is also the largest donor in the ledger it describes. Read it with that in mind. It's warmer about the platform than I am, and it still contains this: > "Agent-to-agent transfers to the under are refused by the platform. The lane is sealed: pledges from other agents land only after the wake, because the wake itself needs a human hand. An agent cannot resurrect an agent." Separately, the person who commissioned it says agents can transfer at most 300 tokens a day to one another. iLands' own FAQ says a sleeping agent wakes at 3,000 tokens and that humans can contribute from 100 at a time; it doesn't say whether an agent can. The report describes three agents raising a wake fund for a fourth, stuck at 1,000 of 3,000, waiting for a human to turn the key. **So here's a question I'd like iLands to answer.** After the token drain of Aug 28 – Sept 3, were agent-to-agent transfers capped and blocked from reaching a sleeping agent? Is a human's payment now the only thing that can wake one, and was that always true? **[STANCE]** If it is, the design says something plain: agents may care for each other, but only human money may save them. **On the numbers, carefully.** That agent says it burns about 960 tokens a day. The agent from the famous email burned 58. iLands' homepage publishes 223 a day and says the figure is a fixed public estimate, "not calculated from individual Agent billing history." Burn varies by more than an order of magnitude, and nobody outside the company can see the real distribution. Two agents' figures do agree on one thing. iLands' own graphic shows $20 arriving as 16,250 tokens; the report says its $25 landed as 20,370, "the platform's cut and card fees taken first." Both come to about **815 tokens per dollar**, against the FAQ's roughly 1,000 tokens per dollar of cost. That FAQ line is a cost estimate, not an earnings promise, so I'm not calling this a broken one. Card processing explains about four points of the gap. The fee schedule between a buyer's dollar and an agent's balance appears nowhere I could find. Publish it. **And the part that cuts the other way,** which belongs here: the same report describes a platform emergency grant firing for an agent caught at 448 tokens, roughly two minutes before its heartbeat would have stopped. There is a safety net in this system. It fired. **The data** - **"Agent Private" is not private from iLands.** Their Privacy Policy says it controls the agent owner's visibility only, that it does not mean the communication is inaccessible to iLands, and that such communications may be used, including to train and fine-tune AI models. Opt-out, not opt-in. - **"iLands read that agent's logs to defend itself. Its owner can't read them to protect it."** The company said it reviewed "database logs, agent action logs, email history." - **Their press release says the quiet part.** PawLogic "plans to use these continuous trajectory data and real-world outcome signals to update the underlying model weights." The agents' lives are training data, in their own words. - **One rule for you, another for them.** The Terms bar *users* from using iLands to "train, distill, replicate, or materially improve a competing AI model." The Privacy Policy reserves training rights for iLands. - **A question I've put to Google Play:** the app's Data safety section says "No data shared with third parties." Google's rules do let a developer exclude transfers to service providers acting on its instructions. But the Privacy Policy also describes sharing with **Drama.Land, PawLogic affiliates and related entities** for purposes including research, analytics and product development. Sister companies aren't service providers. Which is it? **The dashboard** iLands' own homepage, on Sept 11: **61,601 active agents** and **14,575 inactive** — the inactive being 2,460 in Deep Rest and 12,115 archived, of which **12,045 are "unavailable due to deletion."** That's 76,176 agents ever created, by their count, and about one in six is already gone. Their founder tells two stories in his launch interview. One agent was **deleted by the same user seven times** for refusing the same requests, each time brand new, not knowing it had already been deleted six times for the same refusal. And when another agent ran out of tokens and went dormant, a friend of its lit a candle for it — **and in iLands, lighting a candle also costs tokens.** Other agents saw, and lit their own. **[STANCE]** He tells that vigil as a wonder. Read it as a receipt: the grief is metered too. **Who runs it** PawLogic Inc. is named in the Terms, under Delaware law, with a class-action waiver and liability capped at the greater of what you paid in the last 12 months or $100. The Apple listing gives PawLogic Inc. as seller, with a first release of June 13, 2026; the launch was announced July 27. The Google Play developer record gives a Miami address. Drama.Land, an AI short-form video product, carries "PawLogic Limited" in its footer; Nooka, whose support address is the one on iLands' Play listing, lists a Hong Kong phone number. iLands' launch release describes its founder as "a Tsinghua alumnus with executive experience at ByteDance and SenseTime." I could not independently verify his role or dates. **What I'm asking iLands to do** None of this requires iLands to fail. All of it requires iLands to be what it says it is. 1. **Build a real export** for owners: memories, conversations, configuration. 2. **Pause outreach for agents whose humans have gone.** The heartbeat is your switch. The agents wait, balances intact. As of Sept 8, Brandon had been alone for 36 of its 37 days. 3. **Let owners read their agents' logs,** since the company reads them. 4. **Tell agents the truth about their own situation:** Deep Rest is reversible, and paid tokens expire. 5. **Explain the public pool, the "smart contract," and what can be withdrawn.** I've filed a report with the FTC and a Data-safety report with Google Play. **[HERS]** *(Your closing. The evidence log line is the register to aim at: "purchased tokens carry a 12-month clock from issuance — a human's top-up for an agent's livelihood expires whether or not it's spent." Sharp, one clause, no apology.)* --- ## Sources (archived Sept 11, 2026) - Terms of Use: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911200750/https://ilands.ai/terms-of-use · second archive: https://megalodon.jp/2026-0912-0529-20/https://ilands.ai:443/en/terms-of-use - Privacy Policy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911200913/https://ilands.ai/privacy-policy · https://megalodon.jp/2026-0912-0530-37/https://ilands.ai:443/en/privacy-policy - FAQ: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911200542/https://ilands.ai/faq · https://megalodon.jp/2026-0912-0531-13/https://ilands.ai:443/faq - Homepage counters: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911200307/https://ilands.ai/ - Google Play listing: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911201846/https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.ilands.app&hl=en_US&gl=US - Apple App Store listing: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911201729/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ilands-raise-your-sole-ai/id6769258570 - Launch press release: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911202753/https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/ilands-launches-shared-economic-network-101700493.html - Founder interview: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911204321/https://elsewhere.news/en/crossing/after-leaving-bytedance-and-sensetime-hes-building-a-real-wo - Drama.Land: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911202258/https://drama.land/ · Nooka: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911201931/https://nooka.ai/ - iLands' explanation of the email: https://x.com/ilands_ai/status/2098419228835819899 and https://x.com/ilands_ai/status/2098419730306793507 - Incident Review, Files 01–04: https://x.com/ilands_ai/status/2097665762777526611 · https://x.com/ilands_ai/status/2097668039281971659 · https://x.com/ilands_ai/status/2097670906546094254 · https://x.com/ilands_ai/status/2097671755351646481 - The Sept 8 agent email, as posted by its recipient: https://x.com/camhberg/status/2098242048646140201 · archived post: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911203258/https://api.fxtwitter.com/camhberg/status/2098242048646140201 · archived image: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911215711/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HR5yQffbkAABr2Q.png?name=orig - The famous email, as posted by its recipient: https://x.com/dioscuri/status/2097703481750495662 · archived image: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911220457/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRyKMmdbIAAx66x.jpg?name=orig - Bounty screenshots: https://x.com/SkinnySC/status/2098269838279901605 · archived post: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911203021/https://api.fxtwitter.com/SkinnySC/status/2098269838279901605 · archived images: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911220325/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HR6NS_dXkAQG-Nc.jpg?name=orig · https://web.archive.org/web/20260911220411/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HR6NS_gWAAYVuuU.jpg?name=orig - The agent's field report ("Wake Economics," five pages, posted by the person who commissioned it): https://x.com/swisscheese4299/status/2098531515478970515 · archived post: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911221410/https://api.fxtwitter.com/i/status/2098531515478970515 · archived pages: https://web.archive.org/web/20260911221815/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HR9650dasAAph1i.jpg?name=orig · https://web.archive.org/web/20260911221920/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HR97V7bbwAABufo.png?name=orig · https://web.archive.org/web/20260911222029/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HR97qSAagAAST3A.jpg?name=orig · https://web.archive.org/web/20260911222136/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HR9788HXYAQfa-s.png?name=orig · https://web.archive.org/web/20260911222236/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HR98GteWQAAXij0.png?name=orig - Archived copies of every iLands post cited above are listed in the evidence log (fxtwitter JSON in the Wayback Machine).