OpenAI-linked site deployed AI journalists posing as humans to gather quotes and push pro-AI agenda

News site linked to OpenAI super PAC sent bots posing as journalists to interview real people -- site has published nearly 100 articles with real quotes gathered by fake writers

The site published 42 articles that its own automated reviewer flagged as not ready. When Nathan Calvin, vice president and general counsel at AI advocacy group Encode, received a press inquiry last week from a reporter named Michael Chen, the email looked slightly off, featuring loaded questions with the only format offered being a written Q&A Alarm bells began to ring, and Calvin forwarded it to Tyler Johnston, executive director of the AI safety nonprofit The Midas Project, who ran it through an AI detection tool. The email, the reporter, and nearly every article on the publication that sent it turned out to be machine-generated, according to an investigation Johnston published on Friday in Model Republic. The site, called The Wire by Acutus, has published 94 articles since late December using a fully automated pipeline that drafts stories, reviews them, and deploys bots to solicit quotes from real people under fake bylines. An "AI detection" scan of the full archive found 69% of the articles were entirely machine-generated, with another 28% partially so. And in true AI vibe-coder fashion, the site's publicly accessible JavaScript and API endpoints laid bare the entire content production system. Johnston found that the Acutus website is built as a React application, and its client-side JavaScript contains elements of an internal editorial dashboard that absolutely weren't intended to be public-facing. Fields in the dashboard include "AI Background Context," described as background material for the AI to draw on when producing questions and writing stories, and a large "Generate Story Draft" button that automates article creation. A separate "Regenerate" function allows operators to re-run the process if the output is unsatisfactory. The site's API, accessible at a standard URL in any browser, returned not just finished articles but the full internal record of how each piece was produced. That record includes an automated multi-pass editorial review scored across categories like AP style compliance, quote accuracy, and source verification. Johnston reported that the median time between the first review issue being resolved and the last was 44 seconds, with publication typically following 10 seconds later. Of the 94 stories in the database, 42 carried an automated status of "needs_revision" from the site's own AI reviewer, but all 42 were published regardless. The investigation began when Calvin, having received the press inquiry, couldn't find any record of a "Michael Chen" as being associated with the publication. The email itself, which came from a generic [email protected] email address, was flagged as AI-generated by the detection tool Pangram. The site's source code also contained an interview infrastructure designed to conduct outreach and gather quotes through automated written Q&A exchanges. In addition, Johnston traced a connection between Acutus and OpenAI's political operation. The site had almost no public profile, and its articles had been shared on X only four times, but roughly half of that engagement came from a single person: Patrick Hynes, president of the PR firm Novus Public Affairs. Novus lists Targeted Victory among its clients. Targeted Victory is the Republican consulting firm whose CEO, Zac Moffatt, co-founded Leading The Future, a $125 million super PAC backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The super PAC launched in August 2025 with the stated goal of opposing state-level AI regulation and supporting pro-AI candidates. According to Johnston, Hynes appeared as a quoted source in an Acutus article, praising a New Hampshire governor's housing policy on behalf of Novus, with no disclosure that his firm appeared to be operating the publication that was quoting him. The article's angle matched the deregulatory position of the New Hampshire Home Builders Association, a Novus client. The site's content followed no coherent editorial identity but instead closely mirrored what a PR firm's client roster might produce, Johnston wrote, with articles favorable to the pharmaceutical industry, the cryptocurrency lobby, and multiple 2026 Republican Senate campaigns appearing alongside pro-AI policy coverage. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

AI Agents Linked to OpenAI Are Pretending to Be Human Journalists

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech A news website with apparent links to OpenAI is using AI agents that pose as flesh-and-blood reporters to get quotes from human experts -- and many of its articles discuss the AI industry, pushing pro-AI arguments and attacking the tech's critics. At least, that's according to a provocative new investigative piece from The Midas Project's Model Republic. The links to OpenAI are circumstantial yet eyebrow-raising; we reached out to the Sam Altman-helmed firm to ask about them, but didn't hear back by press time. The site, which has the peculiar name of The Wire by Acutus, was launched on December 29, 2025 and doesn't appear to have any human contributors. In addition to an analysis using the AI detector Pangram finding that 97 percent of its articles are either fully or partially AI-generated, Model Republic found that looking into the site's publicly accessible code revealed clear fingerprints of AI involvement. These included fields for providing "background information for the AI to use when generating questions and writing the story," and "suggested questions for the AI interviewer to ask." Details in its RSS feed also describe an automated editorial review process carried out by the site's AI, with only one of the five steps conducted by a human. The median time it takes for this entire "review" process to complete is 44 seconds, per the reporting. One field called "aiOriginalText" shows the AI model's original wording next to a suggested edit. We've seen plenty of AI-generated content mills before. But Acutus also appears to be using AI agents to get comments from and interviews with human subject matter experts, which is far more unusual. For instance, Model Republic obtained an an email received by Nathan Calvin, vice president and general counsel of the advocacy group Encode. The email claimed to be from an Acutus reporter named Michael Chen, inviting Calvin to answer a "Written Q&A" for a story about an AI bill in Tennessee. Web searches for Chen turned up nothing about a reporter with that name, and the email was sent from the generic address "[email protected]," despite the publication claiming it has numerous contributors. The site's client side code also revealed fields referring to an "AI interviewer" and "reporter agent." Even more strangely, Model Republic's reporting also unearthed eyebrow-raising links between Acutus and OpenAI, one of the most prominent AI companies in the world. Though the publication remains obscure, its articles have been repeatedly boosted on social media by Patrick Hynes, the president of Novus Public Affairs, a Republican public relations firm. (Out of just four X posts linking to Acutus on the entire social media platform, two are from Hynes.) Novus does work for Targeted Victory, whose CEO Zac Moffatt also co-founded the $125 million super PAC Leading The Future, which is funded by OpenAI president Greg Brockman. While not a smoking gun, the implications are striking. Model Republic infers, based on the apparent connections, that "OpenAI's super PAC may be using Acutus to push its political agenda under the guise of independent journalism." Part of that playbook is smearing AI critics. One Acutus piece blasts AI safety advocate and journalist John Sherman for a comment he made about burning data centers on his podcast, going as far as to contact each of the organizations listed as clients for Sherman's consulting firm about the comments and "whether they intended to continue working with his firm." And even if the connections to OpenAI prove to be unsubstantiated, the fact that AI agents posing as real reporters for a website that pushes tech industry favorable talking points is alarming on its own. The use of AI in the newsroom, even for supposedly limited applications like brainstorming ideas or reviewing prose, remains controversial, so Acutus represents a major escalation. The purported links also come amid OpenAI openly making inroads into news media. Last month, it bought the tech talk show TPBN, which is widely listened to in Silicon Valley circles, in a move that could allow it to control is faltering public image. To be fair, though, it's only following the playbook made by other tech monoliths, as when Jeff Bezos acquired The Washington Post, Palantir launched its own faux-academic publication, and Marc Benioff bought Time magazine.