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 “reporter@acutuswire.com,” 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 Victory, whose CEO Zac Moffatt also co-founded the $125 million super PAC Leading The Future, which is funded by OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
While not a smoking gun, the implications are striking. Model Republic infers, based on the apparent connections, that “OpenAI’s super PAC may be using Acutus to push its political agenda under the guise of independent journalism.”
Part of that playbook is smearing AI critics. One Acutus piece blasts AI safety advocate and journalist John Sherman for a comment he made about burning data centers on his podcast, going as far as to contact each of the organizations listed as clients for Sherman’s consulting firm about the comments and “whether they intended to continue working with his firm.”
And even if the connections to OpenAI prove to be unsubstantiated, the fact that AI agents posing as real reporters for a website that pushes tech industry favorable talking points is alarming on its own. The use of AI in the newsroom, even for supposedly limited applications like brainstorming ideas or reviewing prose, remains controversial, so Acutus represents a major escalation.
The purported links also come amid OpenAI openly making inroads into news media. Last month, it bought the tech talk show TPBN, which is widely listened to in Silicon Valley circles, in a move that could allow it to control is faltering public image. To be fair, though, it’s only following the playbook made by other tech monoliths, as when Jeff Bezos acquired The Washington Post, Palantir launched its own faux-academic publication, and Marc Benioff bought Time magazine.
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