// ARS TECHNICA — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Dartmouth's provost warned us about AI cheating—but his own AI use cost him his job
People who love AI don’t always love telling others they used it.
On August 9, 2026, Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell wrote a Washington Post op-ed called “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.” This week, Schnell discovered the depths of the problem himself as he resigned from the university after an advisory committee found that he failed to disclose significant AI use in an academic paper and in the Washington Post op-ed, even though publishers required such disclosure.
Schnell didn’t make it especially easy for the committee to investigate his AI use; the report uses the term “insufficient cooperation.” He did turn over his Dartmouth laptop, but he did not turn over logs from his personal LLM accounts related to the writings in question. Nor did he agree to meet with the committee.
The committee did get access to the Claude enterprise account Schnell had used through Dartmouth, though. This shows him using the LLM as a tool for revising his papers, finding and fixing bugs in code, and editing or generating figures. For instance, Schnell would run his papers through Claude and ask things like:
I am getting read[y] to submit the enclosed paper, its supplementary materials and the enclosed repo to ChemSystemsChem. This paper is not biological, but rather chemical. Imagine that you are a reviewer for this paper with expertise in nonlinear chemical dynamics and mathematical chemical kinetics. What would be your referee report for this paper?
This is quite a bit different from asking Claude to write your entire paper for you, and Schnell has long insisted that he used AI as an editorial aid and discussion partner. He told Semafor that he had used chatbots “to refine a few arguments” and “check for grammatical errors.” He told one journal editor that he “used AI as an editorial tool” to “help refine sentences, improve clarity, and the expression of arguments.” He had not disclosed his AI use to an academic journal, he said, because he “did not understand that this type of AI-assisted editing required disclosure.”
Indeed, Schnell’s own description of what he did with AI doesn’t sound, on the long list of AI-powered sins, like it would rank near the top. But it’s hard to know. As the Dartmouth committee points out, the full scope of Schnell’s AI use was unclear to them. The committee believes that Schnell’s public statements may understate “the nature of the Provost’s actual AI use” and says that Schnell regularly “went beyond his other public descriptions of his use of AI in writing.”
We do know that Schnell also asked LLMs to take TeX files and “make the corrections to the files, and the repo. If you have to generate new figures, please provide them to me. Let me know what you change in the repo, and text files so that I can take a look into it.”
Whatever you think of his actions, Schnell repeatedly failed to disclose them. It is certainly possible that he thought his AI use was on par with a spelling or grammar checker, though one Claude exchange raises questions about whether Schnell wanted to hide traces of LLM activity in his work. From the committee report:
Provost Schnell’s Claude logs reflect that he uploaded to Claude a manuscript of a forthcoming article entitled Academic Freedom and Catholic Mission: The Procedural Overlap Zone in University Governance and prompted Claude: “Are there many signatures of AI writing in this article?” Schnell later submitted a revised manuscript that incorporated the kinds of changes Claude suggested.