A Harvard economist’s column criticizing President Donald Trump’s tariffs has become the center of a fight over artificial intelligence in elite opinion writing.
Ricardo Hausmann, the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab, wrote the Financial Times opinion piece, which ran Thursday, according to the source material.
But after readers criticized the column’s style online, the Financial Times attached an editorial note acknowledging that AI had been involved before publication.
The Financial Times added an AI disclosure
“It has come to our attention that AI was used to condense a longer draft of this column prior to submission to the FT and our own editorial involvement,” the note reads, according to the Financial Times as quoted in the source material.
The paper also said its code of conduct bars AI from the writing process, according to the source.
The episode quickly drew attention because the column was not merely about trade policy. It also involved a prominent Harvard figure, a major international publication, and a growing newsroom concern: whether AI tools are being used in ways readers are not told about.
Readers flagged the column before the note appeared
According to the source material, readers on social media questioned the column’s prose before the Financial Times disclaimer was added.
One X user described it as the worst AI “slop” the user had seen in a major outlet. Another posted a screenshot from the AI-detection tool Pangram that reportedly rated the 841-word piece as 71% AI-generated.
Those detector claims come with an important caveat. Pangram and its chief executive, Max Spero, have become frequent reference points in AI-authorship disputes, but the reliability of such tools remains contested, according to Slate as cited in the source material.
The source also notes that The Guardian rejected one Pangram accusation against a longtime staffer as “preposterous,” and that Fortune reported on a separate case in which a detector score helped damage an author’s book deal even though she denied using AI.
Academics and media figures criticized the episode
Michael Socolow of the University of Maine argued on X that the case could make it harder to push students toward original writing.
“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,” Socolow wrote.
Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, who the source says has previously praised Hausmann, also weighed in on X. He wrote that he found the episode “astonishing, both in its writing and its publication.”
The central facts remain narrower than some of the online reaction: the Financial Times acknowledged AI was used to condense a longer draft before submission and before its own editorial involvement. The source material does not establish that AI “wrote” the entire piece, and AI-detection scores are disputed as proof of authorship.
