Writing

Does an Autonomous Fact-Checking Agent Earn Its Cost?

A ReAct agent vs. a single-shot RAG baseline, on 58 real claims with PolitiFact ground truth

Short answer: partially. An agent that plans its own fact-checks beats a single-shot baseline by a wide margin when it finishes - but a hard-enforced guardrail causes 19% of investigations to never reach a verdict at all, and finishing costs about 34x more either way.