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A deep-dive investigation exposes The Wire by Acutus as a predominantly AI-generated news platform performing covertly and possibly serving undisclosed political and commercial interests.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
An investigation has cast The Wire by Acutus as a largely automated news operation that used AI-generated reporters to approach real people for comments while publishing articles under a veneer of human journalism. The scrutiny began after Nathan Calvin, vice president and general counsel at the AI advocacy group Encode, received an email from a reporter named Michael Chen that seemed unusually formulaic. When Tyler Johnston of the AI safety non-profit The Midas Project examined it, he concluded that the message, the purported journalist and much of the site\u2019s output were machine-made.<\/p>\n
According to Johnston\u2019s account in Model Republic, the Acutus site has published 94 articles since late December through an end-to-end system that drafts, edits and posts copy with little apparent human intervention. He said a scan of the archive suggested that 69% of the pieces were entirely AI-generated and a further 28% were partly generated by machines, while another report on the investigation described the proportion of AI-written material as 97%. Johnston also said the site\u2019s own review pipeline repeatedly flagged stories for revision, yet all of them were published anyway.<\/p>\n
The investigation went beyond the articles themselves. Johnston said public-facing code on the Acutus website exposed internal dashboard tools, including fields for AI background notes, a story-generation button and a regeneration function for rewriting drafts. He also reported that the site\u2019s API exposed the full production trail for each article, including automated checks for AP style, quote accuracy and source verification. In his account, the median time between the last review issue being cleared and publication was just seconds, a pace that raises questions about how meaningful the editorial review could have been.<\/p>\n
The wider concern is not only that the outlet appears to have been built around automation, but that it may also have been used to amplify political and commercial interests without clear disclosure. Johnston traced social-media promotion of the site to Patrick Hynes, president of the public affairs firm Novus Public Affairs, which counts Targeted Victory among its clients. Targeted Victory is led by Zac Moffatt, who co-founded Leading The Future, a $125 million super PAC backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz. Johnston said one Acutus article quoted Hynes praising a New Hampshire governor\u2019s housing policy without making clear any connection between the speaker and the publication. He also described the site\u2019s editorial line as oddly consistent with a PR-style client agenda, surfacing pieces favourable to pharmaceuticals, crypto interests, Republican Senate hopefuls and pro-AI policy positions.<\/p>\n
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