A news website with apparent links to OpenAI is using AI agents that pose as flesh-and-blood reporters to get quotes from human experts — and many of its articles discuss the AI industry, pushing pro-AI arguments and attacking the tech’s critics.
At least, that’s according to a provocative new investigative piece from The Midas Project’s Model Republic. The links to OpenAI are circumstantial yet eyebrow-raising; we reached out to the Sam Altman-helmed firm to ask about them, but didn’t hear back by press time.
The site, which has the peculiar name of The Wire by Acutus, was launched on December 29, 2025 and doesn’t appear to have any human contributors. In addition to an analysis using the AI detector Pangram finding that 97 percent of its articles are either fully or partially AI-generated, Model Republic found that looking into the site’s publicly accessible code revealed clear fingerprints of AI involvement. These included fields for providing “background information for the AI to use when generating questions and writing the story,” and “suggested questions for the AI interviewer to ask.”
Details in its RSS feed also describe an automated editorial review process carried out by the site’s AI, with only one of the five steps conducted by a human. The median time it takes for this entire “review” process to complete is 44 seconds, per the reporting. One field called “aiOriginalText” shows the AI model’s original wording next to a suggested edit.
We’ve seen plenty of AI-generated content mills before. But Acutus also appears to be using AI agents to get comments from and interviews with human subject matter experts, which is far more unusual. For instance, Model Republic obtained an an email received by Nathan Calvin, vice president and general counsel of the advocacy group Encode. The email claimed to be from an Acutus reporter named Michael Chen, inviting Calvin to answer a “Written Q&A” for a story about an AI bill in Tennessee. Web searches for Chen turned up nothing about a reporter with that name, and the email was sent from the generic address “[email protected],” despite the publication claiming it has numerous contributors. The site’s client side code also revealed fields referring to an “AI interviewer” and “reporter agent.”
Even more strangely, Model Republic‘s reporting also unearthed eyebrow-raising links between Acutus and OpenAI, one of the most prominent AI companies in the world. Though the publication remains obscure, its articles have been repeatedly boosted on social media by Patrick Hynes, the president of Novus Public Affairs, a Republican public relations firm. (Out of just four X posts linking to Acutus on the entire social media platform, two are from Hynes.) Novus does work for Targeted…
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