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An anonymous reader of Marginal Revolution had Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra audit 138 papers by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman independently, recomputing headline numbers from the , with a third trying to refute every flagged problem before grading the survivors.
Tyler Cowen posted the results on October 28th: 2,035 problems, 147 serious enough to change a headline number, at least one problem in 69% of papers, and 97% of the major and moderate errors with a clear direction overstating the paper's claim.
Saez and Zucman have not responded, and no human has checked the audit.
Their work underpins Thomas Piketty's account of rising inequality and the wealth-tax proposals built on it, so the 147 will now get checked by people. That is the test of whether model-run replication works: how many survive a hostile human read.
AI auditors flag 147 headline-changing problems in Saez and Zucman's inequality research
An anonymous reader of Marginal Revolution had Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra audit 138 papers by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman independently, recomputing headline numbers from the replication data, with a third agent trying to refute every flagged problem before grading the survivors. Tyler Cowen posted the results on October 28th: 2,035 problems, 147 serious enough to change a headline number, at least one problem in 69% of papers, and 97% of the major and moderate errors with a clear direction overstating the paper's claim.
Saez and Zucman have not responded, and no human has checked the audit. Their work underpins Thomas Piketty's account of rising inequality and the wealth-tax proposals built on it, so the 147 will now get checked by people. That is the test of whether model-run replication works: how many survive a hostile human read. SourcesAC
Sources
- ASaez-Zucman audit replication sitesaez-zucman-audit-replication.vercel.app
- CErrors in the research of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (Marginal Revolution)marginalrevolution.com
This story ran in the Morning Brief of November 1st 2026.