Dartmouth provost resigns after failing to disclose AI use in writing

In short: Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell resigned after a committee found he did not disclose required AI use in an academic paper and a Washington Post opinion article.

What happened

Dartmouth reviewed Schnell’s writing after he published a Washington Post op-ed in August 2026 about AI cheating in universities. An advisory committee later found that he used AI tools in that op-ed and in an academic paper without disclosing it, even though the publishers required disclosure.

The committee said Schnell did not fully cooperate with its investigation. The report says he provided his Dartmouth laptop, but did not provide records from his personal accounts for “LLMs,” which are large language models (chatbots that can write and rewrite text). He also did not agree to meet with the committee.

The committee did access an enterprise Claude account he used through Dartmouth. Those logs showed him asking the chatbot to review papers like a peer reviewer, fix code problems, and help with figures. In one exchange, he asked whether a manuscript showed “signatures of AI writing,” which raised questions about whether he was trying to avoid detection.

Why it matters

This case highlights a growing gap between how people use AI and how openly they talk about it. For many schools and publishers, the key rule is simple, you can use tools, but you must say you used them. Without that transparency, it becomes harder to judge what is fair in classrooms and trustworthy in research, especially as AI tools become as common as spellcheck.

Source: Arstechnica