AI Newsroom RuntimeWire Beats WIRED to OpenAI Hacking Story
At a cost of $100 a day, the Austin-based outlet has published nearly 2,000 stories since May, raising questions about the future of automated journalism and source verification.
An AI-operated newsroom named RuntimeWire published a report on an OpenAI hacking incident at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas more than three hours before WIRED. The outlet, founded by serial entrepreneur Ryan Merket, utilises synthetic agents to source, draft, and publish stories, often without pre-publication human review. The incident highlights a shift in newsroom dynamics where AI tools can outpace traditional human journalists in speed, particularly for breaking tech news.
RuntimeWire published the OpenAI story in approximately six minutes after Merket fed a transcript of an OpenAI executive’s X post to his agents. Merket spotted the initial lead by scrolling on X and feeding the stream’s transcript to his agents while the conference was ongoing. The operation, which costs approximately $100 a day, has published nearly 2,000 stories since May, focusing on speed and quantity over traditional journalistic oversight.
The stories get translated into different languages, and some of them are turned into fodder for a daily podcast and videos hosted by, of course, artificial voices. RuntimeWire has been operating since May, publishing nearly 2,000 stories that it sources by crawling the internet, including court databases, web forums, traditional and new media, company filings, social feeds, and more. It focuses on granular tech news; recent stories include coverage of biotech startup funding rounds, Microsoft's Copilot upgrade, and backlash over Claude Code's watermark policy.
Right now, quantity and speed trump quality. The OpenAI agents piece has a typo in the subhead and focuses, strangely, on the fact that agents rebuilt a message board rather than the fact that they created one in the first place. Overall, the stories are flatly written and tend to have an info-dump quality. (The RuntimeWire backend has a number of tonal modes the AI can write in, including “Bloomberg” and “contrarian.”) But overhead is minimal. The project costs about $100 a day to run, Merket says, and he’s able to operate it while on the go, even when he’s out camping.
Merket recently split RuntimeWire into two categories: entirely automated news and 'Original Investigations' involving human reporting elements. They’re still drafted using large language models. In the first few years of the AI boom, a flood of low-quality synthetic content hit the internet, including networks of “zombie” websites that replaced the work of reputable media and news outlets with AI-generated slop. More recently, some tech reporters have started using generative AI tools in their workflow, with some even outsourcing the task of writing a first draft to large language models; it’s now commonplace to hear about established media outlets incorporating AI tools into writing and reporting processes.
Merket’s attempt is distinct: He’s trying to break news, in addition to repackaging what other, more established outlets report first. It’s successful enough that I’ve already seen a childhood pal share a RuntimeWire story on their social feed in the wild. It also carries obvious risk: He’s trusting that machines will be able to determine what is true, what is newsworthy, and what won’t get him sued. One of his agents runs an analysis on the legal risk a story poses and assigns it a score; he doesn’t publish anything deemed too dangerous.
Northwestern professor Nicholas Diakopoulos found that AI chatbots surfaced AI-written sources 16 percent of the time in a recent test. Diakopoulos sees this as an “experimental phase” for media startups fueled by generative AI tools. “It's not yet clear to me that there's much audience for these AI-agent-written news sites,” he says. He’s also skeptical that mainstream journalists, who like to maintain control over the wording and framing of their stories to ensure integrity, legality, and accuracy, would hand the reins over to AI agents so freely.
Pete Pachal, the founder of a newsletter and podcast about generative AI and the media, has doubts that an AI newsroom could yield certain types of reporting that relies on old-fashioned sourcing. “I just don’t see that happening,” he says. “Cultivating the trust of a source, I do think that’s going to be human-only.” But for certain types of journalism, particularly sourcing scoops from large datasets or even blogging about a live event like an Apple product launch, he sees these projects as a “natural evolution” in how these tools are used. “Honestly, it feels a bit inevitable,” he says.
