Pirate · AE Studio
AE Studio · Skunkworks Ventures
Commission No. CCXVII<br>15 May 2026
AE Studio is mining roughly eighty million pages of Spanish colonial bureaucracy, ship manifests, admiralty filings, and insurance records with large language models to triangulate the locations of undiscovered shipwrecks and lost cargo. The model produces coordinates. The model does not swim. That is where you come in.
Corpus
80M
unread pages
Equity
100%
retained on spin-out
First targets
Within the year
Expected dry runs
A few
I.The thesis
Treasure exists because people systematically distorted reality under incentive pressure. So do alignment failures in modern AI. Both are governed by the same mathematics: holonomy on incentive-deformed representations. We are testing the operator on archival data where it is unusually clean, and the payoff happens to be physical.
What an individual human cannot read in a lifetime, the model can read in an afternoon. Cross-referencing five centuries of cargo lists against weather logs, court records, insurance disputes, and surviving letters yields a probability surface over the Atlantic and Caribbean floor. The peaks of that surface are what we are hiring you to dive on.
II.Articles of service
Required of the applicant
Lifetime nautical experience. Open ocean, blue water, multi-day passages.
Demonstrated ability to dive in conditions insurance companies decline to cover.
Salvage, free-dive, or commercial dive certifications, or the lived equivalent.
Comfortable with cold-start expeditions in unfamiliar jurisdictions. You handle permits, port officials, customs, and the occasional moray eel.
Bias toward action. You read the coordinates, you go.
Willing to be wrong publicly. Expect the first sites to be empty. The hit rate improves.
Discretion. The find is the only thing that matters until it is secured.
Physically capable. This is hard work in salt water.
Counted as merit
Prior salvage of anything older than 1800.
Working Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch. Most of the corpus is in these languages.
Existing relationships with admiralty lawyers in Spain, Portugal, the UK, or any Caribbean state.
Hands-on experience with side-scan sonar, magnetometers, or sub-bottom profilers.
Sailing certifications above bareboat.
Operational experience in Somalia, Hormuz, or Malacca.
You already own a seaworthy vessel.
You have read Peter Turchin or read Asimov's Foundation for fun.
III.Articles of compensation
Modeled on the privateer commissions of the 17th century. Updated for the requirements of a US-incorporated venture capital structure.
§ 01
Equity
Founder-level stake in the venture. Granted at price zero for tax purposes. 100 percent retained on Skunkworks spin-out.
§ 02
Cash
Advance for gear, vessel hire, and crew. Base salary $50,000 to $500,000, weighted heavily toward upside.
§ 03
Recovery share
Profit share on recovered cargo, settled after admiralty proceedings and finder's costs. Structure modeled on Odyssey Marine and similar precedents.
§ 04
Title and insurance
Jurisdiction-dependent and handled by counsel before any vessel leaves port. We carry the legal cost. You carry the rope.
IV.From the model's log
Four sample candidates the corpus has surfaced. Full coordinates released upon signed engagement.
1622
A vessel sailing under royal manifest, recorded as wrecked in a documented hurricane. Surviving insurance correspondence shows cargo weight inconsistent with the official record. Probable underreporting.
24°N 52'14" · 81°W 39'08"
1715
A scattered fleet on a known route. One of the wrecks recovered. Court testimony from a surviving boatswain references a sister vessel that the colonial record never accounts for. Off-manifest cargo.
27°N 21'02" · 80°W 17'55"
1739
A merchantman lost in a documented chase. Crown filings list a value the surviving log entries contradict by an order of magnitude. Provenance laundering.
15°N 04'31" · 75°W 58'12"
1798
An unnamed brigantine referenced in three separate East India Company letters, never logged at any port of arrival. Reading the letters together resolves the route. Unrecorded loss.
06°S 12'47" · 38°E 22'04"
Sign the articles
Send a one-page brief on the most interesting wreck you would chase if we handed you a vessel tomorrow. Tell us why that one. Include your nautical record, your dive log highlights, and any salvage you can talk about publicly.
Submit your brief →
[email protected] · subject line: Pirate
Be it known that AE Studio, having identified an extraordinary opportunity in the application of large language models to forgotten archival corpora, doth establish a Skunkworks venture for the recovery of cargo lost to the sea and to bureaucratic obscurity. The bearer of this commission is empowered to act on behalf of the venture in all reasonable matters pertaining to the location, recovery, and lawful disposition of said cargo,...