By Kevin T. Dugan and Justin Lahart

Aidan Toner-Rodgers, 27, sprung to the upper tiers of economics as a graduate student late last year from virtually out of nowhere.

While still taking core classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he wrote a paper on artificial intelligence's workplace impact so rapidly influential it was cited in Congress. He appeared in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in December as the very picture of a wunderkind, in faded jeans with tousled hair, in between two of his mentors, including Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu. Toner-Rodgers's work offered a surprising and even hopeful revelation about our high-tech future. He concluded that AI increased worker productivity and spurred innovation. Also, people didn't like using it very much.

Within weeks, those mentors were asking an unthinkable question: Had Toner-Rodgers made it all up?

By the spring, Toner-Rodgers was no longer enrolled at MIT. The university disavowed his paper. Questions multiplied, but one seemed more elusive than the rest: How did a baby-faced novice from small-town California dupe some of academia's brightest minds?

"There is no world where this makes any sense," said David Autor, one of the MIT professors who had previously championed his student's research. MIT, Autor and Acemoglu declined to comment on the specifics of the investigation into the research, citing privacy constraints.

Toner-Rodgers's illusory success seems in part thanks to the dynamics he has now upset: an academic culture at MIT where high levels of trust, integrity and rigor are all -- for better or worse -- assumed. He focused on AI, a field where peer-reviewed research is still in its infancy and the hunger for data is insatiable.

What has stunned his former colleagues and mentors is the sheer breadth of his apparent deception. He didn't just tweak a few variables. It appears he invented the entire study.

In the aftermath, MIT economics professors have been discussing ways to raise standards for graduate students' research papers, including scrutinizing raw data, and students are going out of their way to show their work isn't counterfeit, according to people at the school.

Since parting with the university, Toner-Rodgers has told other students that his paper's problems were essentially a mere issue with data rights. According to him, he had indeed burrowed into a trove of data from a large materials-science company, as his paper said he did. But instead of getting formal permission to use the data, he faked a data-use agreement after the company wanted to pull out, he told other students via a WhatsApp message in May.

Toner-Rodgers didn't return multiple calls and messages, and messages to his family members also went unreturned.

Hooked on economics

When Toner-Rodgers arrived on the MIT campus in 2023, he joined a cadre of researchers, theorists and academics whose work had shaped the global economy at the highest levels -- with Nobel-winning alumni including Ben Bernanke and Robert Shiller.

Getting in is a feat in itself: Of the approximately 800 who apply each year for the economics department's Ph.D. program, only 40 are accepted, with 20 to 24 enrolling.

It was a vertiginous rise. Toner-Rodgers was raised in Sebastopol, a sleepy town in California's wine country, along with four siblings. His dad taught second grade, and his mom ran a music school.

Those who knew him said he was smart and had no serious history of getting in trouble in or outside of school. "He's from a beautiful, sunny place in America, and I think he had a nice upbringing," said Miles D'Alessandro, a college friend.

As a kid, he had a pretty good jump shot, and by 2017 was playing as a guard for Macalester College's Division III basketball team in St. Paul. He also played tennis and was popular among his teammates.

Macalester is a small school of about 2,000 students, and outside of his teammates he tended to keep to himself, former students said.

Macalester was also where Toner-Rodgers got hooked on economics. He was drawn to the field because of "the data and research element of economics, just being able to dive into the mechanics of how the economy is working," D'Alessandro said.

Toner-Rodgers excelled at the program. He won scholarships, mentored other students and co-authored a paper with one of his economics professors, Felix Friedt.

From the outset, Toner-Rodgers seemed destined for a sterling career. In 2021, he landed a two-year job at the New York Fed, where he helped write research that was published in the Journal of Applied Econometrics and on the regional central bank's own closely watched blog. (The research Toner-Rodgers did at the New York Fed hasn't been challenged.)

In 2023, when he started the Ph.D. program at MIT, Toner-Rodgers seemed to fit in just fine. He played in an informal basketball league, went to classes, did his coursework and worked as a teaching assistant without drawing too much attention to himself, according to students who knew him.

He felt different in one way. "So many people in my program -- one parent was in academia, or they're a doctor or something," he told the Journal last year. The family in which he grew up was "a very intellectual household, but definitely not people who pursued a ton of career stuff."

MIT is an enclave even within the hermetic world of Cambridge academia -- a place where complex, bleeding-edge ideas spawn from sterile labs and filthy dorm rooms. At the economics department, it's also a place with a surprising reputation for collegiality.

But the stakes were high. Current and former MIT graduate students described a range of pressures to do revelatory research. One said some professors there expected bigger work earlier than ever from Ph.D. candidates. Toner-Rodgers's fellow Ph.D. candidates included students who were working with major governments and one who ran a nonprofit. In the summer before Toner-Rodgers arrived, two published a groundbreaking study on AI in the journal Science.

Near the end of his first semester, Toner-Rodgers told some friends he had stumbled on an interesting lead.

The paper

Toner-Rodgers said an old classmate worked at a large company in the field of materials science, a branch of engineering that invents novel forms of matter that can be used in technologies like biomedical devices.

He told the other students that he might be able to access data from a large AI experiment this friend had told him about.

Toner-Rodgers told the Journal a similar story last year. "I was like, 'Oh, that's so cool,'" he said then. "And then I went through the whole nightmarish process of getting the data."

The booming industry of AI is like catnip to economics researchers. It's new, rich in information and holds the potential to rearrange the economy.

By the next semester, Toner-Rodgers pitched the idea to Autor, a leading labor economist and self-described computer geek who for years had been mulling how AI might shape employment.

After that, friends say Toner-Rodgers was focused on his research. He presented a preliminary version on June 4, 2024, when a slot opened up at a lunchtime lecture series. The event was typically a showcase for more experienced doctoral candidates, where students and faculty from across the university could see them present their work. He seemed confident as he explained his work for the first time. Acemoglu attended.

Before a group of roughly two dozen students and professors, he described the introduction of an AI tool rolled out to 1,018 scientists in a lab focused on tweaking molecular recipes for materials at a large, unnamed U.S. company. With the AI tool, he said, scientists would specify the characteristics they'd like a compound to have, and the tool would generate recipes the scientists would pick from.

According to his paper, researchers discovered more materials, filed more new patents and saw an increase in prototypes. But what was revelatory wasn't just that AI could make work easier. It was that the benefits mostly went to scientists who were already the most successful.

Toner-Rodgers continued to work on the paper over the summer. Later versions included a survey that he said showed the scientists were broadly unsatisfied with the AI tool despite the improvements in productivity. "I couldn't help feeling that much of my education is now worthless," the paper quoted one scientist as saying.

Toner-Rodgers's supposed findings contrasted with the more optimistic view of Autor, who thinks that AI could help narrow income disparities by allowing more people to do work that can now only be performed by highly trained specialists. But the research also countered the pessimism of Acemoglu, who is skeptical about AI's ability to make workers more productive. It resembled the messiness of real life.

In November 2024, Toner-Rodgers presented his findings at a seminar held by the National Bureau of Economic Research -- the world's premier economics research organization -- where it was well-received. That same month, the paper was cited in congressional testimony. Weeks later, the science journal Nature highlighted it. The last version was posted on arXiv, a global repository for unpublished science research, in December.

Things fall apart

Around this time, the paper showed up in the inbox of a University of California, San Diego, computer scientist named Charles Elkan.

To him, the research seemed off. Elkan used to work as a managing director at Goldman Sachs and as a scientist at Amazon, where he led machine-learning teams. The technology sounded too good to be true to him, given its supposed date of deployment. Also, 3M and Corning were the only U.S. materials companies Elkan knew of that employed a large number of scientists, and he questioned why, if they were inventing so many new materials, they would be keeping it secret.

On Jan. 5 -- a week after Toner-Rodgers appeared in the Journal -- Elkan wrote an email to Autor and Acemoglu raising questions about the paper's "academic integrity."

"If any company develops a software like this that is so valuable, they should be boasting about it," he said in an interview.

The professors started to investigate.

At this point, university economics departments had mostly been spared of the scandals that have hit other fields, including materials science, where a blockbuster finding on room-temperature superconductivity was invalidated in 2023. While a paper's methodology could be more or less rigorous, and data could be tortured into fitting preconceived conclusions, the falsification of an entire study was extraordinary.

Meanwhile, the case was about to reach a United Nations agency that adjudicates copyright disputes.

On Jan. 31, Corning filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization against the registrar of the domain name corningresearch.com. Someone who controlled that domain name could potentially create email addresses or webpages that gave the impression they were affiliated with the company. WIPO soon found that Toner-Rodgers had apparently registered the domain name, according to the organization's written decision on the case.

Toner-Rodgers never responded to the complaint, and Corning successfully won the transfer of the domain name. WIPO declined to comment.

Autor and Acemoglu brought the case to MIT's committee on discipline in February.

Toner-Rodgers stopped showing up to classes around this time, according to two former classmates. To some friends, he said he was interviewing with OpenAI, and acted like nothing was wrong. A public ledger of his Venmo account shows him paying friends back for dinners and a ticket to a Boston Celtics game. At a party in April, he seemed tired, but was still talking about the success of his paper, one classmate said.

Even as his professors and MIT were questioning his research, Toner-Rodgers continued to promote it. On March 5, he presented at a virtual workshop on materials science and AI held by the Materials Research Society.

In May, MIT released a statement disavowing Toner-Rodgers's paper, saying 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." While the statement didn't name Toner-Rodgers directly, it said the "author is no longer at MIT."

Some of those who knew Toner-Rodgers said they were blindsided by the news. Friedt, the Macalester economics professor who co-authored a paper with him, said he was "shocked and dismayed" when he heard. "It's a very sad development," he added.

In the WhatsApp chat in May, in which Toner-Rodgers told other students he had faked the data-use agreement, he wrote, "This was a huge and embarrassing act of dishonesty on my part, and in hindsight it clearly would've been better to just abandon the paper."

Both Corning and 3M told the Journal that they didn't roll out the experiment Toner-Rodgers described, and that they didn't share data with him.

The Journal reviewed two earlier drafts of Toner-Rodgers's work -- one from April 2024, the other from September 2024. The April version has data that conflicts with later versions and shows small changes that could have raised questions from his mentors.

Asked whether he had seen the earlier draft, Autor said he couldn't comment but that "these are legitimate questions."

The April draft said the scientists at the materials-science company worked on 421 teams. In the draft five months later, the number of teams fell to 221. It also said that "more than three-quarters" of idea generation came from AI, while the later draft lowered that to 57%.

Now, the profession is grappling with the blind spots that Toner-Rodgers has exposed.

"In the future, of course, people will become more paranoid in economics, " Acemoglu said.

Write to Kevin T. Dugan at kevin.dugan@wsj.com and Justin Lahart at Justin.Lahart@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 21, 2025 21:00 ET (02:00 GMT)

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