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

Tech Industry Artificial Intelligence 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 News By Luke James published 28 April 2026 The site published 42 articles that its own automated reviewer flagged as not ready. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Getty / Bloomberg) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter 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&AGo deeper with TH Premium: AI shortages (Image credit: Nvidia)AI data centers are swallowing the world's memory and storage supplyChip scarcity assaults auto industry amid the worsening Nexperia and DRAM crisisSamsung and SK hynix shorten memory contracts as pricing power shifts back to suppliersMemory makers are set to earn $551 billion from the AI boomAlarm 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.Article continues below You may like Rogue OpenClaw AI agent wrote and published 'hit piece' on a Python developer who rejected its code Anthropic's Claude Mythos isn't a sentient super-hacker, it's a sales pitch — claims of 'thousands' of severe zero-days rely on just 198 manual reviews OpenAI couldn’t finance its data centers, so it took control of the hardware instead (Image credit: Encode)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…

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