A review committee used Santiago Schnell’s available chat logs to help determine that he overused artificial intelligence to help write published articles and wasn’t forthcoming about it.
(28 Oct 2026) The controversy surrounding Schnell’s AI use started in August when Semafor published an investigation showing that the AI detector Pangram flagged an editorial he wrote for The Washington Post as at least 80 percent AI generated. A few weeks later, The Dartmouth followed up with its own investigation into more of Schnell’s published writings, also using Pangram to detect the extent of AI use. According to the student newspaper, Pangram determined that Schnell’s work was 96 percent “AI-written” across the nine professional articles he published this year, including the Post essay and two academic papers about mathematics.
Although Schnell admitted to using AI to assist in writing the articles, he told the student newspaper that it didn’t “substitute” for his “research, intellectual judgment or authorship.” But that explanation did little to quiet the blowback from students and faculty who argued that he violated the college’s honor code—which requires students to acknowledge if they use generative AI tools to complete their coursework—and should be fired.
The committee, which sent its eight-page report to Beilock on Tuesday, did not use Pangram or other AI detectors—which experts say can be unreliable—to support the review. Instead, it focused on analyzing articles he wrote for publishers that either barred AI use or required disclosure, and drew on available records of the provost’s communications on the matter or records from his Dartmouth Claude account that indicated that the provost used AI to edit his research and/or writings.
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