Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann got caught using artificial intelligence to write an anti-Trump tariff column for the Financial Times — the same kind of AI use that would get his students hauled before an academic integrity board.
The Financial Times attached an editor's note to Hausmann's August 13 op-ed, "Trump is taxing the dark matter that pays America's way," conceding that "AI was used to condense a longer draft of this column prior to submission to the FT and our own editorial involvement." The paper's code of conduct specifically prohibits AI in the writing process. The FT told Fox News Digital it would conduct an "editorial review process to look at this piece in more detail."
Hausmann is the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of Harvard's Growth Lab. Neither Harvard nor Hausmann responded to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
AI detection software Pangram flagged 71% of the 841-word piece as AI-generated, according to a screenshot posted by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan. The Daily Caller noted that Pangram's reliability remains contested — the Guardian dismissed one Pangram accusation as "preposterous," and a separate case saw the tool score a novel at 78% AI, helping sink the author's book deal despite her denials. But the FT already conceded the core fact: AI was used. The only question is how much.
Readers flagged the column's wooden prose before the disclaimer appeared. A Harvard student and freelance writer, Alex Bronzini-Vender, called it "the worst AI slop I've seen in a major publication." Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal, who has praised Hausmann's work in the past, wrote that he found the episode "astonishing, both in its writing and its publication."
Here's the real story for working Americans: the same elite university apparatus that polices student AI use with academic integrity proceedings can't keep its own faculty from outsourcing their thinking to a chatbot. As University of Maine professor Michael Socolow wrote on X: "It's going to be very difficult this academic year trying to encourage students to write persuasively with creativity, individuality, and style… when a star Econ professor at Harvard Kennedy School publishes such easily ID'ed AI slop in the Financial Times."
Harvard senior research fellow Christopher Dede told Fox News Digital that universities are "preparing human beings to lose to AI as opposed to preparing human beings with skills that complement AI" — but that's a conversation about adaptation, not about the two-tier enforcement system where professors get editor's notes and students get disciplinary hearings.
Hausmann's column argued that Trump's tariffs wouldn't shrink the current account deficit — standard elite consensus economics. But he couldn't be bothered to condense his own arguments without a machine doing the work. The class that insists it alone is qualified to shape policy can't even write its own op-eds. What else are they outsourcing?
