OpenAI's super PAC is funding an AI-generated news site that attacks industry critics
OpenAI's super PAC is funding AI-generated news site attacking industry critics
An investigation reveals that Acutus, a news site launched in December 2025, is almost entirely AI-generated, with 69% of its articles flagged as fully AI-generated and only 3 of 94 as human-authored. The site's operators left code exposing an AI-driven editorial pipeline, including an 'AI interviewer' that emails real people for quotes. Evidence links the site to Republican PR firm Novus Public Affairs, whose president, Patrick Hynes, appears as a quoted source. OpenAI's super PAC is reportedly funding the site to advance its political agenda.
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.
- narrator
Meanwhile, the AI critics got an enormous war chest thanks to Vitalic giving them all his dog coins as a joke that ended up being worth almost a billion to fight against AI.
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/03/14/vitalik-buterin-...
- iammrpayments
Probably doing something similar here.
This place average post went from “look at this new javascript framework” to “I just became 100x more productive with AI” in the last 3 years
- Alien1Being
Perfectly rational.
Unleash bots and sock puppets, generate mindless hype.
Add a bit of circular accounting.
Watch the investments roll in and the share price soar up.
Profit...
- Alien1Being
Fraud, but a presidential pardon has already been paid for in advance.
- JumpCrisscross
Is there a state in which this constitutes fraud?
- protocolture
>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.
How credible is this credible claim?
- 0xDEAFBEAD
Funny, I was told by HN commenters that worries about AI risk are just a clever marketing strategy on the part of OpenAI and friends. I wonder why they would be working so hard to push back?
- jms703
This is normal tech company marketing strategy, right?