The reporters at this news site are AI bots. OpenAI’s super PAC 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 (reporter@acutuswire.com), 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 itself

Acutus 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 is

But 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 AcutusWire.com.

That form is used to create a “topic.” Once a topic has been created, it is turned into a story using a large button labeled “Generate Story Draft.” After the story has been generated, another button labeled “Regenerate” allows you to repeat the process. Separate tools in the same interface use AI to extract quotes from “research notes,” run a grammar check, and perform a multi-pass AI-led editorial review that returns scored output across a variety of editorial benchmarks.

A recreation of the user interface for the contributor dashboard, based entirely on the public JavaScript code available at AcutusWire.com.

Acutus licenses everything it publishes under Creative Commons, unusual for a news outlet, as part of a wire-service syndication setup. “Our stories are made available as a wire service for all publishers to use,” the about page reads, in reference to an RSS feed listing each finished story on the site.

But the site exposes more than just its finished stories. The URL acutuswire.com/api/wire, accessible in any browser and responsible for populating the homepage of the website with articles, returns the site’s full story database alongside the internal record of how each piece was made, including detailed results from the AI editorial review process. There are five categories of review that appear to be conducted by the AI, four of which are then scored out of 100 (AP style compliance, quote accuracy, source verification, and one simply labeled acutus), and one which returns a status (fact-checking). For each of these categories aside from acutus, the AI flags issues, proposes corrections, and logs resolutions (presumably adjudicated by the user) with timestamps.

A snippet of code from the public API response available at AcutusWire.com/api/wire.

The timestamps suggest that not much effort goes into the human side of this process. Within a single piece, the entire multi-pass review completes in a median of 44 seconds from the first issue being resolved to the last, and the publication click lands a median of 10 seconds after the last issue is resolved. On 42 of the 94 stories in the feed, the automated reviewer’s own “overall” status reads “needs_revision,” a sign that the AI system itself flagged the piece as not yet ready to publish. Each of them was published anyway.

Some flagged issues include a field called “aiOriginalText” that preserves the AI model’s original wording next to the suggested edit — a naming choice that only makes sense if the original drafts were AI-generated.

A snippet of code from the public API response available at AcutusWire.com/api/wire.

One quirk of the site is that there are signs it was developed with the intention of being consumed by AI models themselves, including liberal permissions for specific AI crawlers in the robots.txt file, the presence of a deprecated ai-plugin.json file for ChatGPT, and the inclusion of an experimental llms.txt file. The latter one, despite misleadingly describing the site as “independent journalism” and “grounded in primary research, verified sources, and direct reporting,” also lets slip one clue about its content provenance: “Reporting follows AP Style and a strict zero-hallucination editorial standard.”

Acutus’ interview infrastructure

If the whole pipeline is automated, how do quotes from real people end up in the articles?

On closer inspection, many of the quotes in Acutus pieces appear to be lifted from previously published web content, consistent with them being scraped by an LLM.

An example of a quote on Acutus lifted from previously published web content.

But not all of them. At least one comes from an actual person who says he was approached for comment. Harvard Business School professor Joseph Fuller wrote on LinkedIn that he was “pleased to share my thoughts with Acutuswire, a production of a number of independent journalists,” and linked to an article on skills-based hiring in which he was quoted (an article released eight days before Rep. Nancy Mace’s Skills-Based Federal Contracting Act, H.R. 5235, headed to the House floor). And of course, Nathan Calvin received an email from “Michael Chen” asking for an interview.

The client-side code suggests why Calvin was only offered a “written Q&A” rather than a call. The JavaScript bundle contains multiple fields referring to an “AI interviewer” or a “reporter agent.” The default text for a field showing uploaded interviews reads: “No interviews uploaded via the reporter API yet. Interviews submitted by the agent will appear here for review.” Another field lets a human enter “Suggested questions for the AI interviewer to ask.”

In other words: Michael Chen appears to be the AI agent. When Acutus needs a quote from a living expert, it sends a bot to get one. Fuller — and, presumably, anyone else whose name appears in these stories after responding to an Acutus email — shared their thoughts with software pretending to be a human.

Some articles also cite unnamed sources that don’t look like they came from the AI agent. Usually this is an unnamed Republican Senate staffer, operative, or strategist, in multiple cases described as “close to Senate leadership.” These extremely convenient, anonymous quotes (which align neatly with whichever stakeholder the piece favors) suggest that at least some quotes are being fed directly into the AI during the story-generation process.

Who’s behind Acutus?

Acutus hasn’t attracted much public attention. Google searches return almost nothing beyond the site itself, and on Twitter it has been linked only four times by relatively obscure accounts. But two of those four posts were either written or retweeted by one person: Patrick Hynes, president of a Republican PR firm called Novus Public Affairs. Hynes tweeted an Acutus article about Scott Brown’s 2026 Senate candidacy and separately retweeted an Acutus piece shared by @DrTechlash, an anti-AI-safety account.

Hynes is based in New Hampshire, which matters because a surprising share of Acutus’ content concerns politics in the Northeast, especially New Hampshire and Maine. The site has pieces on New Hampshire’s economy, former Sen. Scott Brown’s record, Maine’s education system, Maine’s drug policy, and a Maine Senate candidate.

Acutus’ reporting also overlaps with Hynes’ PR work on behalf of Novus. To take one example: on Jan. 24 — 10 days before President Trump signed sweeping reform of pharmacy benefit managers into law — Acutus ran a piece attacking them. PhRMA, the pharmaceutical manufacturers’ trade group that spent a record $38.19 million on lobbying in 2025 while pushing for that exact reform, appears in the article’s internal source log as “PhRMA statements,” despite no PhRMA figure being quoted in the published piece. Novus, meanwhile, lists PhRMA as a client on its website.

Perhaps more telling: Hynes himself appears as a quoted source in one of Acutus’ own articles, speaking on behalf of Novus with no disclosure that his firm appears to be operating the publication quoting him. Using your own firm’s president as a supposedly independent expert, without acknowledging the relationship, is a striking departure from basic journalistic norms. The quoted remarks are not incidental, either: Hynes uses them to praise New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s workforce-housing push for “cutting red tape.” This is the precise deregulatory framing sought by the New Hampshire Home Builders Association, a name on Novus’ public client list.

Hynes also has a track record of dressing political operations in the clothes of journalism. In 2010, he co-founded a New Hampshire-based news outlet, NH Journal, with a group of fellow Republican operatives — a setup that The Hill reported led to “skepticism over its independence within New Hampshire circles.” When Hynes departed in 2014 to join a PAC supporting Scott Brown’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, election experts told The Hill that his PAC work would have “opened up the publication to, at best, questions about its legitimacy as an independent news organization and at worst would have muddied the waters in terms of campaign finance law.” (Interestingly, Hynes has since soured on Brown and is now actively supporting his opponent in the upcoming 2026 election, a notable alignment given that Acutus published a piece critical of Brown).

Acutus’ reporting also blurs the lines of journalistic ethics. One piece criticizes AI-safety advocate and longtime broadcast journalist John Sherman for comments on his podcast suggesting that people would burn down data centers if they understood the risks AI posed. Rather than simply cover the quote, Acutus names each of the clients listed by a video production and consulting firm Sherman runs (unrelated to his podcast) and reports that it “contacted each of the organizations” to ask “whether they were aware of Sherman’s statements and whether they intended to continue working with his firm.” The article said none of the organizations agreed to give comment, but also noted that one “privately indicated” it no longer worked with him (a detail that itself raises questions about whether the AI reporter respected on/off-the-record norms). It also named a former lieutenant governor who serves as an advisor to Sherman’s nonprofit, reporting that “she did not respond to repeated requests for comment and did not denounce the calls for violence.”

From my review of the site, more than a third of Acutus’ published pieces read less like journalism and more like paid advocacy for a specific interest group: stories favorable to the pharmaceutical industry, the cryptocurrency lobby, real estate trade groups, theatrical-film exhibitors, the natural-gas and data-center lobbies, and multiple 2026 Republican Senate campaigns (Dan Sullivan’s in Alaska, John Sununu’s in New Hampshire, Susan Collins’ in Maine, and attacks on multiple Democratic candidates in Michigan). No editorial identity unites these topics, but the client list of a PR firm might.

The obfuscatory funding channel which seems to connect OpenAI to Acutus.

OpenAI’s growing astroturf campaign

There’s still the question of why “Michael Chen” was interested in Encode in particular. Looking through Acutus’ AI coverage is where the picture sharpens. Around 15% of the site’s articles cover AI, and they tend to hit a few talking points shared by the anti-regulation tech lobby. The site casts aspersions on Anthropic, criticizes blue states regulating AI and red states regulating AI, and blames rhetoric from journalists and grassroots organizers for recent violence against OpenAI. 

A selection of the AI-focused articles on Acutus.

These are the talking points of Leading The Future, the $125 million super PAC funded primarily by OpenAI president Greg Brockman alongside OpenAI investor a16z, and assembled under the guidance of OpenAI’s chief political operative, Chris Lehane. Similar arguments are being pushed by the operatives linked to Leading The Future, including Chris Lehane, Nathan Leamer, Josh Vlasto, Zac Moffatt, and the anonymous Twitter account Doomer Daylight.

There’s a line connecting Acutus to that orbit. The third name on Novus’ aforementioned client list is Targeted Victory, the GOP consulting firm at the heart of OpenAI’s political apparatus: its CEO co-founded Leading The Future, and as I wrote a few weeks ago, Leading The Future’s websites share many legal and technical characteristics with the sites of other Targeted Victory clients. Hynes himself routinely retweets messages aligned with Leading The Future, including from Leamer directly.

A screenshot of Novus’ client list. Emphasis added.

If I’m right, OpenAI’s super PAC may be using Acutus to push its political agenda under the guise of independent journalism. That would directly contradict OpenAI’s own stated positions. The company prohibits the use of its products for political campaigning or lobbying, and its safety framework previously warned about the risk of AI-generated political influence campaigns — language that has since been removed. Through a network of super PACs and PR firms, the company now appears to be funding exactly that: an AI-powered Potemkin news organization.

It would not be OpenAI’s first foray into astroturfing. The company was in the news this month over accusations that it quietly astroturfed a children’s safety coalition to lend credibility to its policy agenda. Build American AI, the 501(c)(4) advocacy arm of Leading The Future, itself has touted nearly a million “grassroots” supporters — a list generated through extensive paid advertising. 

These cases alone, while disingenuous, didn’t surprise me. I was more surprised when the same political machine began targeting me personally with an anonymous Twitter account, using AI-generated tweets to manufacture the appearance of grassroots opposition to the company’s critics.

Now OpenAI’s super PAC appears to be using AI, perhaps OpenAI’s very own models, to churn out content that advances its political interests and discredits its opponents. Worse yet, Acutus is blatantly lying about that fact, calling the articles it publishes “expert-sourced” and its reporting “independent journalism.” This seems like exactly the sort of AI-driven political influence campaign that OpenAI once considered a major risk category, and still prohibits in its usage policies to this day.