A fake reporter named Michael Chen reached out to Nathan Calvin, VP and general counsel at the advocacy group Encode, seeking comment for a story about an AI bill in Tennessee. The email was flagged as fully AI-generated by Pangram, an AI content detector. Chen doesn't exist. And neither do the reporters at the outlet he claimed to work for, according to an investigation by Tyler Johnston at Model Republic that found the site uses fake reporters. AcutusWire.com launched December 29, 2025. In four months it published 94 articles on AI policy, Senate races, pharmacy reform, nuclear energy, crypto, and more. Pangram analysis found 69% fully AI-generated, 28% partially AI-generated, and only three articles that passed as human-written. No masthead. No bylines. Nothing. But the source code, visible to anyone, tells the whole story: an editorial dashboard with fields for "AI Background Context" and "Question Prompts," plus a big button labeled "Generate Story Draft." The automated editorial review wraps up in about 44 seconds. The site published 42 stories even after its own system flagged them as "needs_revision." The whole operation run by no one willing to put their name on it.
The money trail leads through intermediaries. Leading The Future, a super PAC primarily funded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, appears connected to the site through Republican PR firm Novus Public Affairs and digital consulting firm Targeted Victory. Political committees routinely route payments through consulting firms for media buys and content creation. No check cuts directly from OpenAI to Acutus. But the infrastructure of political dark money makes that kind of distance the whole point.
For anyone tracking AI agents, AcutusWire is a working model of automated influence. The site licenses content under Creative Commons for syndication. Its robots.txt grants special permissions to AI crawlers. There's even a file designed specifically for LLMs to read. This is fake news built for machines to scrape and spread. The prompts write the stories, the stories feed the wire, and the wire feeds whatever picks it up next.