MIT Econ PhD Student Kicked Out for Massive Fraud
"More than just embarrassing, it's heartbreaking."
This is undoubtedly the most blatant and brazen econ fraud of 2025.
It’s about a now-former PhD student at MIT named Aidan Toner-Rodgers.
Amazingly, he has still not deleted his LinkedIn:
Aidan was a rising superstar.
As a 1st-year PhD student at the 1st-ranked econ program in the world, he made national headlines last year with a paper arguing that AI accelerates scientific discovery. For that paper, he was featured in a glowing full-paged photoshoot in the Wall Street Journal flanked by literally the two most influential economists in the world, David Autor (right) and Daron Acemoglu (left), who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics last year.
New research from Aidan Toner-Rodgers, an MIT doctoral student, challenges both Acemoglu’s pessimism and Autor’s optimism. Both professors are raving about it.
“It’s fantastic,” said Acemoglu.
“I was floored,” said Autor.
Aidan’s paper cited six articles by Acemoglu and another six by Autor, which likely contributed to why they were so impressed.
Despite only being a preprint, it has already been cited over 60 times. The paper was also featured in Nature, NPR, Freakonomics, Marginal Revolution, cited by the European Central Bank, and even in the U.S. Congress.
Here’s Toner-Rodgers presenting the paper at a research seminar:
Aidan then did a podcast circuit to promote the paper, including a full hour with The Atlantic:
Just a few months after his media tour, Aidan’s paper was revealed as a fraud: not just fraudulent, but *spectacularly* fraudulent. The entire study was fabricated from thin air, and yet somehow, this psycho gave eloquent seminars and spoke about it for an entire hour to the Atlantic.
The bombshell exposing him as a fraud was dropped 2 months ago when the WSJ — the very same newspaper that honored him with a glowing photoshoot just 4 months prior — published a story: ‘‘MIT Says It No Longer Stands Behind Student’s AI Research Paper’’
In a press release, MIT said it “has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.”
The university said the author of the paper is no longer at MIT.
Toner-Rodgers didn’t respond to requests for comment.
…
“More than just embarrassing, it’s heartbreaking,” Autor said.
MIT has now deleted Toner-Rodgers from their PhD student listing:
The WSJ explained how Aidan was caught, by a skeptical computer scientist:
Read my full investigation below for the explosive details →
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Chris Brunet to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.