Firm that uses AI to locate ancient lost shipwrecks is hiring a literal pirate to salvage sunken treasure, paying up to $500,000 a year — AI mines 500 years of Spanish colonial records spanning 80 million pages to find undiscovered wrecks and lost cargo

['Bruno Ferreira', 'Layer Van-Ds .Vds-Author Font-Size Var --Text-Base', 'Font-Size Var --Vds-Author-Font-Size', 'Var --Text-Base', 'Line-Height Var --Text-Base--Line-Height', 'Line-Height Var --Vds-Author-Line-Height', 'Var --Text-Base--Line-Height', 'Letter-Spacing Var --Tracking-Normal', 'Letter-Spacing Var --Vds-Author-Letter-Spacing', 'Var --Tracking-Normal'] Latest from Tom's Hardware 2026-07-30 11:00:00

A firm that is using AI to locate ancient shipwrecks is sending out a call to seafarers to salvage sunken treasure. That's what AE Studio, a software consultancy and AI research firm, is looking for: a literal pirate to hunt for treasure in the ocean. Amusingly, AE Studio appears to draw a mathematical parallel between the reward of falsifying historical records to hide treasure and incentive-driven alignment failures in AI training. AE Studio went as far as to post a quartet of not-really-hidden coordinates of potential work sites. Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.