AI use in American newspapers is widespread, uneven, and rarely disclosed

AI is rapidly transforming journalism, but the extent of its use in published newspaper articles remains unclear. We address this gap by auditing a large-scale dataset of 186K articles from online editions of 1.5K American newspapers published in the summer of 2025. Using Pangram, a state-of-the-art AI detector, we discover that approximately 9% of newlypublished articles are detected as either partially or fully AI-generated. This AI use is unevenly distributed, appearing more frequently in smaller, local outlets, in specific topics such as weather and technology, and within certain ownership groups. We also analyze 45K opinion pieces from Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, finding that they are 6.4 times more likely to contain AIgenerated content than news articles from the same publications, with many AI-flagged opeds authored by prominent public figures. Despite this prevalence, we find that AI use is rarely disclosed: a manual audit of 200 AIflagged articles, 96.5% of authors and 94.0% of publishers did not disclose AI use. A factuality analysis shows articles flagged as AI-generated are 8.2 times more likely to contain hallucinated claims than human-labeled news. Overall, our audit highlights the immediate need for greater transparency and updated editorial standards regarding the use of AI in journalism to maintain public trust. 1 Recent studies from Pew Research show that (1) 49% of Americans who get news directly from AI assistants report encountering inaccurate information (Lipka and Eddy, 2025); (2) 56% of Americans would feel less confident about a news article if they knew an AI wrote it (Yam and Kennedy, 2025); and (3) 76% believe it is extremely important for them to know if the text they are reading is AI-generated (Kennedy et al., 2025).