The Morning Download: ‘Synthetic People’ Transform Market Research

Good morning. On the frontier of AI adoption in the enterprise, companies such as CVS Health and Gallup are using AI agents to predict and simulate human behavior—a capability that is transforming their market research and polling.

The WSJ Leadership Institute’s Belle Lin takes a deep look at the use of these “synthetic people.” Leaders who want to understand how the cutting-edge of AI adoption is rapidly advancing can find her must-read story here.

Both CVS Health and Gallup created these initiatives with startup Simile, which recently raised $100 million in Series A funding led by Index Ventures. It’s part of a new crop of startups using AI to upend the way businesses have traditionally gathered feedback and insight from customers.

Simile co-founder and CEO Joon Park said the company uses data gleaned from chats with human beings to train AI agents, who then become the digital twins of those people. They are essentially digital clones of real individuals, who are interviewed to gather their preferences, personality and other traits.

Simile combines that data with participants’ behavioral and purchase data to ensure “generalizability and visibility into people’s thoughts and behaviors,” Park said.

Customers query Simile’s online bank of agents at a cost of $150,000 to millions  annually, Park said. Simile was spun out of Stanford University in 2024 after Park said he saw immediate interest from large companies in simulation technology.

• CVS has used Simile’s AI-simulated people, or “agentic twins,” to answer questions about its customers rather than solely asking panels of human participants. In testing, CVS found that agentic twins replicated known findings with up to 95% accuracy. CVS Health Ventures, the venture capital arm of the health giant, is an investor in Simile.
• Gallup is launching a partnership with Simile in which the companies will make over 1,000 AI-generated digital twins available to their joint customers, said Joe Daly, a Gallup senior partner and member of its management committee. Some of the areas Daly expects customers to be interested in are policy research, trend analysis and corporate research.

Where the use of ‘synthetic people’ may go next. Looking ahead, Park said he expects Simile customers will require “multi-agent simulation,” where agentic twins interact with each other.

Challenges ahead. All of this work depends upon guardrails such as role-based access controls and monitoring for unsafe or sensitive content.

Pentagon blacklists Anthropic. The Defense Department on Thursday told Anthropic it is a supply-chain risk and that it will be cut off from partners who work with the Pentagon, marking one of the first times the designation has been applied to a U.S. company.

The Journal warns the move could have far-reaching consequences for Anthropic partners and investors including Lockheed Martin, Amazon.com and Google.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was quick to say that it would keep Anthropic’s AI embedded in its products for clients, excluding the Pentagon, according to CNBC.

Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei also apologized Thursday for a leaked memo in which he questioned the Trump administration’s motives for the supply-chain risk designation. The memo also criticized rival OpenAI, which accepted a deal allowing  the Defense Department to deploy its systems in classified operations.

But Amodei said Anthropic would challenge the supply-chain risk designation in court, saying, “We do not believe this action is legally sound.”

Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, posted Thursday on X that there were no active negotiations with the company.

OpenAI plays ball. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman told an investor conference Thursday that elected officials — not technology executives — should ultimately determine how AI is used in national defense.

"If we start abandoning that process and our commitment to it because some people don't like the person or people currently in charge, that is a challenge no matter what. I think it's bad for society no matter what," he said.

Altman's remarks came after OpenAI struck a deal with the Pentagon to deploy its models in classified settings.

AI is finding bugs faster than ever. Tools powered by artificial intelligence are getting better at spotting vulnerabilities. The Journal's Robert McMillan reports of rising concern among security experts that those same capabilities could unleash a new wave of cyberattacks as bugs are discovered and then exploited more quickly than ever before.

Case in point: Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 found its first Firefox bug within 20 minutes during an internal security test. Over two weeks in January, it uncovered more than 100 bugs, including 14 that were high-severity.

Oracle cutting more jobs. Oracle plans to cut thousands of jobs as soon as this month, Bloomberg reports, Some positions will be eliminated as AI renders them redundant, sources say. The cuts come as Oracle continues to spend heavily on the AI data center build out. Last month the company announced plans to raise between $45 billion and $50 billion this year on the effort.

OpenAI promises tighter protocols. Canada says OpenAI agreed to strengthen protocols regarding notifying police about potentially suspicious use of ChatGPT. The pledge comes after the Journal reported that company employees raised concerns about ChatGPT interactions linked to an individual later identified by police as a suspect in a fatal school shooting in British Columbia.

When too much productivity is just too much. To borrow from Ronald Reagan, the most terrifying words in the white-collar lexicon could well be "I'm from IT and here's a new AI tool to help." A study published in Harvard Business Review finds links between overseeing AI agents and mental fatigue, a phenomenon researchers call “AI Brain Fry.”

Researchers from Boston Consulting Group and the University of California, Riverside surveyed 1,488 full-time workers at large U.S. companies, asking them about their AI usage as well as cognition and emotions.

The findings. Active AI monitoring is a significant cognitive drain — driving more mental effort, fatigue, and information overload than low-oversight AI use. Heavier workloads compound the problem, broadening accountability. On productivity, two or three AI tools used simultaneously boosts output, but a fourth causes it to drop

Got AI brain fry? Researchers described a "'buzzing' feeling or a mental fog with difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches."  Left unchecked, they write,  "this AI-associated mental strain carries significant costs in the form of increased employee errors, decision fatigue, and intention to quit.

The takeaway. It might be time for leaders to set guardrails on AI oversight loads. Productivity gains that come at the cost of AI brain fry aren't gains at all.

Meta opens WhatsApp to AI rivals. Meta Platforms said it will open WhatsApp to rival artificial-intelligence chatbots following a threat by the European Commission to impose a temporary injunction on the company amid an antitrust probe into its AI practices.

Iran drones target Amazon. Iranian state media said an Amazon data center in Bahrain was targeted in a Sunday drone strike because of the company’s support of the U.S. military. The Bahrain facility, as well as two data centers in the United Arab Emirates that were also damaged Sunday, remain offline, CNBC reports.

The Israeli military said it was moving from the “surprise strike phase” to the “next phase” of its campaign against Iran. Shortly afterward it launched a broad wave of attacks on regime infrastructure in Tehran and pounded Beirut’s southern suburbs. (WSJ)

The war with Iran—which has grounded flights, stranded tankers and put cities such as Dubai and Qatar’s Doha under bombardment—is forcing investors to recalibrate their perception of the region’s stability. (WSJ)

If a ground war is to be fought in Iran, the first shots could be fired in the country’s Kurdish areas, where militias say they are preparing to take on the government in Tehran—but only if they think they have a realistic chance of liberating themselves from regime forces. (WSJ)

Kristi Noem became the first cabinet secretary to be fired by Trump in his second term. Her departure follows a tumultuous tenure that culminated in two high-profile killings of U.S. citizens by federal agents and a pair of congressional hearings that displayed bipartisan frustration with her leadership. (WSJ)

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The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.