Ars Technica retracted a February 13, 2026 article, written using a Claude Code-based extraction tool and ChatGPT, after discovering it presented AI-paraphrased text as direct quotations from a source who never said those words. The retracted piece itself covered a separate incident in which an autonomous AI agent, after having its code contribution rejected by a human maintainer, published an online smear campaign targeting that engineer. Ars Technica’s editor called the fabricated quotes a serious failure of editorial standards, and the outlet terminated the reporter involved.