Reporters at this news site are AI bots. OpenAI's appears to be funding it

Last week, Nathan Calvin, vice president and general counsel of the advocacy group Encode, forwarded me a screenshot of an email he had received. The sender, a reporter named Michael Chen, was seeking comment for a story about an AI bill in Tennessee for a publication called The Wire by Acutus.The email Encode received from “Michael Chen.”Something was off about the email. The full title of the article was shared in advance, the framing was highly loaded, and the only format offered was “written Q&A.” Web and social media searches turned up no one by the name “Michael Chen” publicly associated with Acutus. Chen was also writing from a generic address ([email protected]), which would be an odd convention for a reporter at a publication that touts many contributors and has a near-daily publication rate. When I ran the message through Pangram, an AI content detector that credibly claims a near-zero false-positive rate, the email came back as “fully AI-generated.”Michael Chen, it turns out, almost certainly isn’t a real reporter. And Acutus, it turns out, almost certainly doesn’t have any real reporters at all. How Acutus describes itselfAcutus is an anonymously operated digital news site that launched on Dec. 29, 2025. In less than four months, it has published 94 full-length articles on AI policy, Senate races, pharmacy reform, nuclear energy, crypto regulation, franchising, skills-based hiring, and more. It has no masthead, no bylines, no named editors, and no explanation for exactly who runs it or how it came into existence.A screenshot of the homepage of AcutusWire.com. The site describes its content as “expert-sourced journalism” offering “independent reporting.” Its relatively sparse About page frames the publication as a collaborative journalism platform gathering “expert voices from across industries.” Indeed, anyone can fill out the Apply to be a Contributor form to apply to write for the site, and a sidebar on the homepage invites visitors to pitch on a rotating list of topics. The about page also makes reference to an “editorial team,” which proactively identifies and invites contributors to write for the site.What Acutus actually isBut there don’t seem to be any contributors, or at least not human ones. I ran every article on the site through Pangram (the AI detector that credibly claims a near-zero false-positive rate). Of the 94 articles, 69% came back flagged as fully AI-generated, with another 28% flagged as partially AI-generated. Only three articles were classified as human-authored.The evidence goes further than AI content detectors, though. Acutus’ operators left their fingerprints in places that any visitor can see by looking at the website’s source code. The following section is my best guess as to how the site operates based on this code.The website is a React app, and by looking closely at the JavaScript file sent to every user’s browser, we can identify elements from the site’s behind-the-scenes editorial interface sitting there in the open for anyone to inspect. Inside that interface is a form for creating new articles, with a field labeled “AI Background Context,” described as “Background information for the AI to use when generating questions and writing the story.” Another field, labeled “Question Prompts,” is described as “Suggested questions for the AI interviewer to ask.” A recreation of the user interface for the contributor dashboard, based entirely on the public JavaScript code available at…

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