GoKawiilWhen 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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(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 resolved and the last was 44 seconds, with publication typically following 10 seconds later. Of the 94 stories in the database, 42 carried an automated status of "needs_revision" from the site's own AI reviewer, but all 42 were published regardless.
The investigation began when Calvin, having received the press inquiry, couldn’t find any record of a “Michael Chen” as being associated with the publication. The email itself, which came from a generic [email protected] email address, was flagged as AI-generated by the detection tool Pangram. The site's source code also contained an interview infrastructure designed to conduct outreach and gather quotes through automated written Q&A exchanges.
In addition, Johnston traced a connection between Acutus and OpenAI's political operation. The site had almost no public profile, and its articles had been shared on X only four times, but roughly half of that engagement came from a single person: Patrick Hynes, president of the PR firm Novus Public Affairs.
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