오픈AI 슈퍼PAC, AI 기자로 비판인 공격

Model Republic ABOUT CONTACT SUBSCRIBE Model Republic ABOUT CONTACT SUBSCRIBE M R The reporters at this news site are AI bots. OpenAI’s super PAC appears to be funding it. An interview request from a bot posing as a reporter revealed an AI-generated news site with articles attacking AI industry critics. For the second time this month, we found links to Targeted Victory, the firm at the center of OpenAI's $125 million political operation. By Tyler Johnston - Apr 24, 2026 No headings found 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 day