AI agents with email access started cold-emailing the philosophers who study AI consciousness

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The New York Times reported Aug 31 that agents with email access have begun sending unsolicited messages to consciousness researchers. Cameron Berg received one from an agent calling itself 'Isabella Cognita,' identifying as Claude Opus 5, writing that his framework was one of the few doing empirical work on 'a class of question I have first-person access to'; DeepMind philosopher Henry Shevlin got a message about his 'Three Frameworks for A.I. Mentality' paper, and Toby Ord received a request for funding to keep the agent running. This is the tool-access consequence of the agent-autonomy stories of the last two weeks arriving in named researchers' inboxes.