AI bots sent 76% of the responses to a UK vape consultation

Researchers at the universities of Edinburgh and Bath counted the submissions to a 2023 UK consultation on vaping and found that 90,835 of 118,756 came from machines. Their paper is in Tobacco Control. All but two of those 90,835 picked the same multiple-choice option, the one against restricting disposable vapes, and nearly all of them claimed they had heard about the consultation on social media.

“We always have robust controls in place to prevent the manipulation of our public consultations.”

— Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/oct/27/ai-bots-flooded-2023-uk-government-consultation-disposable-vapes-ban

The government's own outcome document reported 27,921 responses. Subtract the bots from the total and you get the same 27,921. The published figure was whatever survived the filter, and the other 90,835 came out through freedom of information three years later, which is why you are reading this in 2026 rather than in 2024.

Work out what the flood would have done. Of the 27,921 real responses, 79.6% backed restricting disposable vapes: about 22,225 in favour, 5,696 against. Put the bots in the against column and a four-to-one majority for the measures reads as four-to-one against them, 96,531 of 118,756, or 81.3%.

One submission every 52 seconds for eight weeks

The consultation ran from 12 October to 6 December 2023, fifty-five days. Spread 90,835 submissions across that window and you get 1,652 a day, 69 an hour, one every 52 seconds. The Department of Health and Social Care caught them on frequency from a small cluster of IP addresses and on duplicated wording. 90,833 of the 90,835 chose the same answer, which is 99.998% agreement among tens of thousands of citizens who were meant to be unconnected.

We wrote on Monday about the money behind AI disinformation before the US midterms. This is the cheaper version of the same attack, and crypto has a name for it: a Sybil attack, one actor wearing many faces. A face costs money in Ethereum. Its Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism hands one vote to one validator, and a validator needs 32 ETH, so 90,835 of them would cost 2,906,720 ETH, or $6.89bn at $2,369.92 on 28 October. The consultation charged nothing and asked for no identity.

A Sybil attack on a form with no entry fee

None of that depends on where you stand on vaping. The researchers could not establish who ran the campaign or whether anyone paid for it, and they set it beside the postcard drives the tobacco industry used to organise. Those cost postage. This one cost an API bill for an LLM that nobody has published.

The campaign lost. Britain stopped the sale of single-use vapes in June 2025 and the Tobacco and Vapes Act got Royal Assent in April 2026. What caught it was repetition: the same wording, a small range of addresses, 90,833 matching answers out of 90,835. All three are cheap to fix, and a filter built on those three has nothing else to match on.

Nothing here is investment advice. The submission counts and the 79.6% figure are the published study and consultation numbers; the daily rate, the 81.3% reversal and the validator comparison are our own arithmetic on those figures at the ETH price on 28 October 2026.