The theft is industrial-scale and shameless.
A site called National Today — run by TOP Agency, a PR firm that claims Microsoft and Intel as clients — is churning out roughly 300 AI-generated articles per day by stealing reporting from local newsrooms, national outlets, and independent journalists. The site lifts quotes, rewrites stories, and publishes them without attribution or links. Then Google surfaces the plagiarized versions alongside the originals.
Futurism caught National Today red-handed multiple times. After publishing an original interview with a researcher about AI’s effects on cognition, National Today reposted a reworded version that same night — including the direct quote from Futurism’s interview — without mentioning the source. Same pattern with a story about a controversial GLP-1 marketer. Same pattern with a realtor’s AI-generated demo listing.
The scope is staggering. One article about Lena Dunham plagiarized quotes from three separate interviews she gave to The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian — zero attribution.
The Theft Extends to Grieving Families
National Today doesn’t discriminate by subject matter.
Last week, it stole a story from KTRE reporter Mellie Valencia about a local mother whose 10-year-old daughter died from a rare brain tumor. Valencia had spent significant time building trust with the family, conducting interviews, and reporting out a sensitive story. National Today scraped it, rewrote it, and published it without credit.
“This is very upsetting to see,” Valencia told Futurism. “A lot of leg work was put into the story and real human connections were made with the family — and to see it pulled and replicated… is sad.”
The site operates dozens of local-sounding sections — NYC Today, Sacramento Today, Cleveland Today — designed to mimic legitimate local news outlets. Google Search and Google News were serving up National Today’s stolen content alongside actual local reporting until Futurism contacted Google for comment. Most results disappeared shortly after.
The AI Hallucinates Wildly — and No One’s Checking
The errors are comically bad, which suggests no human is even skimming the output before publication.
National Today’s AI frequently replaces real names with “Jane Doe” and “John Doe.” One article reported that NASA astronaut “John Doe” dedicated a Moon crater to his deceased wife, “Jane Doe” — the astronaut’s actual name is Reid Wiseman, and his wife was Carroll Wiseman. Another piece attributed a quote to “Chief Jane Doe” in Burlington, Vermont. The actual police chief is Shawn Burke.
The site even misquoted Pope Leo XIV, claiming he said “Jesus probably would not be on board with that” in response to Trump’s AI-generated Jesus image. There’s no evidence the Pope said anything remotely similar.
Sometimes the AI gets stuck in a loop. One fabricated quote — “We must not let individuals continue to damage private property in San Francisco” — appears in unrelated stories about the Dallas Cowboys, a Boston biotech company, and a New York City mayor’s tax day event.
The CEO Is Listed as the Author
Benjamin Kaplan, CEO of TOP Agency, is credited as the author on numerous plagiarized National Today stories.
One piece under his byline about San Francisco public health workers lifts quotes directly from Mission Local’s reporting — without credit. Another Kaplan-bylined story steals wording from a Commonwealth Club interview.
Robert Cox, a journalist at Talk of the Sound in New Rochelle, New York, caught National Today ripping off his crime story last week. “Over the course of a week, I put in significant original work… to produce a timely, accurate article,” Cox wrote. National Today’s version “adds no independent sourcing, no new facts, and no original analysis” — just Kaplan’s name on stolen reporting.
TOP Agency describes National Today as a tool to help brands “Create Ownable Viral Moments” and “reach 10M consumers, 100K media outlets, and 10K influencers.” Translation: it’s a marketing vehicle built on the theft of local journalism at incomprehensible scale.
Google Rewarded the Theft — Until Someone Noticed
Before Futurism’s inquiry, Google was actively surfacing National Today’s plagiarized content in both Search and Google News results.
After contact, most National Today results vanished. Google issued a statement: “Our policies prohibit producing content at scale for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings… We take appropriate action when we identify violations of our policies.”
The question remains: how long was this running before anyone noticed?
National Today appears to have started as a holiday calendar site around 2017 — “Day of the Mushroom,” “Save the Elephant Day,” “National Joseph Day” — before pivoting to large-scale AI-plagiarism journalism around January 2026. The site still hosts a calendar alongside its stolen news slop.
Futurism sent multiple requests for comment to National Today and TOP Agency. No response.
Source: Futurism