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

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.

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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.