Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Some weird AI transcriber?

I interpreted it as the author adding some internal dialog about how they want to do more research on the article/person in question so they were opening up a new tab so they could learn more. But I can see how this could certainly be some copy/paste artifact.

> some copy/paste artifact

It’s this. I noticed after posting, found it funny and so left it in.

More likely stuff that gets picked up when you copy and paste. I’ve seen that happen in the Google Chat electron app.

Maybe an accessibility feature for TTS or blind users?

that's exactly it, not AI at all. If you inspect any link in the article it shows it as screen-reader-text