Brown University Hit by AI Cheating Scandal Involving 40 Students
An article published by El País has brought to light a significant incident at Brown University where artificial intelligence tools played a central role in widespread academic dishonesty. The case, which came to public attention in mid-2026, involved dozens of students who submitted assignments generated almost entirely by large language models without proper attribution or disclosure. Faculty members first grew suspicious when they noticed unusual patterns in student submissions, including perfect grammar across papers from non-native speakers, identical phrasing in unrelated courses, and references to sources that did not exist.
The episode began during the spring semester when professors in the departments of history, political science, and computer science started comparing notes about submitted work. One instructor received a 15-page research paper that cited nonexistent academic journals and quoted from books that had not yet been published. Another noticed that every student in a seminar on ethical philosophy produced essays with the same distinctive sentence structures and organizational patterns. When confronted, several students admitted to using advanced AI systems to draft, revise, and polish their assignments. Some had even instructed the models to insert occasional minor errors to avoid detection by existing plagiarism checkers…