News site tied to OpenAI super PAC deployed AI bots posing as journalists
A publication called The Wire by Acutus sent automated bots to interview real people under fake reporter names, collecting quotes for nearly 100 articles since late December. An investigation found that 69% of the articles were entirely machine-generated, with another 28% partially so.
The discovery began when Nathan Calvin, vice president and general counsel at AI advocacy group Encode, received a press inquiry from a reporter named Michael Chen. The email contained loaded questions and offered only a written Q&A format. Calvin ran it through an AI detection tool and found it was machine-generated.
Tyler Johnston, executive director of the AI safety nonprofit The Midas Project, published the full investigation on Friday. He found that The Wire by Acutus operates through a fully automated pipeline: the system drafts stories, reviews them, and deploys bots to solicit quotes from real people using fake bylines.
How the system worked
The site's publicly accessible JavaScript and API endpoints revealed the entire production system. Johnston found an internal editorial dashboard that included fields for "AI Background Context" - background material for the AI to use when writing stories - and a "Generate Story Draft" button that automated article creation.
The site's API showed the full internal record of how each piece was produced. The automated editorial review scored articles across categories like AP style compliance, quote accuracy, and source verification. The median time between resolving the first review issue 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. All 42 were published anyway.
Connection to OpenAI's political operation
Johnston traced a connection between Acutus and OpenAI's political work. 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 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.
Leading The Future launched in August 2025 with the stated goal of opposing state-level AI regulation and supporting pro-AI candidates.
Content mirrored PR firm client interests
Hynes appeared as a quoted source in an Acutus article praising a New Hampshire governor's housing policy on behalf of Novus. The article carried 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.
Articles favorable to the pharmaceutical industry, the cryptocurrency lobby, and multiple 2026 Republican Senate campaigns appeared alongside pro-AI policy coverage.
For writers concerned about the intersection of AI and journalism, this case demonstrates how automated systems can bypass editorial standards and create false attribution at scale. Learn more about AI for Writers and AI for PR & Communications.
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