Hype Index
The recurring signature series: every big AI claim, rated signal versus noise. Meme-able, screenshot-able, ownable.
Hype Index: 'AI Has Been the Leading Cause of Layoffs for Five Straight Months'
AI led Challenger's July reasons with 10,970 cuts, down 72% from May's 38,579. I built the month-by-month table from all eight monthly reports: AI has been leading a shrinking number.
Hype Index: 'AI Agents Can Now Work 14 Hours Autonomously'
METR's headline horizon is a 50% success rate, not a workday. I fetched 27 articles citing it: of the 25 that loaded, 8 never mention the coin flip and 17 never name the task suite.
Hype Index: 'Half of All Planned U.S. Data Centers Have Been Canceled'
The source sentence says it 'wouldn't be surprising if 30-50% of the capacity slated for 2026 ends up delayed,' and the dataset is global. I classified 19 articles carrying the claim: 5 kept the word 'delayed.'
Hype Index: 'Business AI Adoption Crossed 50%'
Ramp says 50.4% of businesses pay for AI. The Census Bureau says 19.8%. I read the published methodology behind 8 adoption statistics and only 3 of the 7 I could open disclose their frame, their denominator and what 'using AI' means.
Hype Index: 'AI Search Cut Wikipedia's Human Traffic by 8%'
Wikimedia's 8% is real and Wikimedia supplied the caveat itself. I fetched 30 citations: two thirds carry the caveat, only half link the source, and 16 of 22 headlines delete every cause except AI.
Hype Index: 'AI Capex Is Carrying the US Economy'
The top 20 results for AI's share of GDP growth report five different percentages for the same quarter, and only two of them say which BEA estimate they used.
Hype Index: 'ChatGPT Doesn't Just Help You Find What to Buy, It Also Helps You Buy It'
I swept all 33 merchants named in agentic-commerce launch announcements for a live agent checkout manifest. Eight serve one, and every single one of them is a Shopify store.
Hype Index: 'Klarna Replaced 700 Agents With AI, Then Hired Humans Back'
Klarna's own SEC filings say the AI went from two-thirds of chats to 80%, headcount fell every single year, and the famous rehiring was a pilot with two agents. Of 20 articles I classified, 5 got it right.
Hype Index: 'AI Agents Will Outnumber Sellers 10 to 1 by 2028'
Gartner said it twice, eight months apart, with different analysts. Both times the same sentence predicted fewer than 40% of sellers would say the agents helped, and I could not find one article that tells you the survey behind it was 210 people.
Hype Index: 'The EU AI Act Now Requires You to Label Your AI Cold Email'
Article 50 became applicable thirteen days ago. I mapped all seven paragraphs to the party each one binds: zero reach a one-to-one sales email, and zero of 20 outbound vendors mention the AI Act anywhere on their trust, legal or changelog pages.
Hype Index: 'AI Rejects 75% of Resumes Before a Human Sees Them'
I followed 30 live pages asserting the 75% figure to the end of their citation chains. None reached a primary study, the median page cited nothing at all, and the oldest traceable use of the number was a keyword-match threshold rather than a rejection rate.
Hype Index: 'AI Now Matches Human Experts on Real Work'
GDPval's top score is 1,849 Elo against a human baseline anchored at 1,000. That is not 1.8x a human. Of 16 articles quoting the figure, zero disclose that the open task set is 220 of 1,320.
Hype Index: 'You Need Schema Markup to Get Cited by AI'
Eight of the top 30 articles put a number on schema's AI citation lift. Not one of those numbers traces to a study that measured it, and zero of seven AI vendors document schema.org as an input to their answers.
Hype Index: 'AI Overviews Cut Publisher Clicks by 58%'
Ahrefs measured a 58% drop in the click-through rate of the position-one result, not a 58% drop in publisher clicks. I fetched 30 articles citing the number and found 14 distinct percentages in circulation for the same idea.
Hype Index: 'AI Killed Junior Developer Hiring'
Software postings are up 14.6% in the 12 months since Section 174 was repealed, the 4th-best of 41 categories. I read 22 articles blaming AI for the decline. Zero mentioned the tax change.
Hype Index: 'You Can No Longer Buy Software Without Paying for AI'
I checked 20 SaaS suites for a purchasable tier that excludes the AI. Fourteen gave a clear answer, two still sell one, and only one of those two puts it on the pricing page.
Hype Index: 'Your Electricity Bills Have Gone Up by as Much as 267%'
The 267% was a wholesale price. I pulled EIA's state retail table instead: PJM states' median residential price rose 10.3% in a year against 4.0% everywhere else.
Hype Index: 'AI Is a Bubble'
Dalio says early-stage bubble, Burry bought a billion in puts, and the capex slope is vertical. Also: the revenue is real and the multiples are half of 2000's. We read the top 20 verdicts and issue the only honest score.
Hype Index: 'AI Will Wipe Out Half of Entry-Level White-Collar Jobs'
The canary data is real and getting worse: a 16% relative employment decline for the youngest workers in AI-exposed jobs. The bloodbath framing is something else, and even the claimant's own economist won't back it.
Hype Index: 'We're Cutting Jobs Because of AI'
AI is now the number one stated reason for US job cuts. I checked the ten largest AI-attributed layoffs of 2026 for an actual mechanism: nine of ten had none, and 59% of hiring managers admit the framing is cover.
Hype Index: '95% of AI Pilots Fail'
The most-quoted AI statistic on earth rests on 52 convenience-sampled interviews and a six-month ROI window, and the report it comes from has quietly vanished from MIT's own site. We rate it.
Hype Index: 'Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by 2027'
Gartner's most-quoted agent prediction turns out to be the rare AI claim that is probably understated. The distortion happens in the headlines that cite it, and in one number from the same press release everyone skips.
Hype Index: 'AI Will Replace Your Entire SDR Team by 2027'
Every outbound vendor is selling the death of the SDR. We rate the claim on the signal-to-noise scale.
Hype Index: 'This Model Has PhD-Level Reasoning'
Every launch now claims doctorate-grade intelligence. We rate what that phrase actually means on the signal scale.