A record eight Pulitzer awardees disclosed using AI this year, including five winners and three finalists, Nieman Lab reports. Disclosures have been required since 2024. This year, entrants used AI tools and large language models more often, mainly to search large document sets faster.

The Wall Street Journal used an internal LLM to summarize thousands of public documents on Texas floods. The Minnesota Star Tribune used ChatGPT to translate a female shooter's diary written in faux Cyrillic, then had language experts check the results. The Associated Press used an LLM to search tens of thousands of leaked documents on Chinese surveillance technology, and the New York Times used GPT-5 to check its manual classification of SEC crypto cases.

Pulitzer administrator Marjorie Miller told Nieman Lab that the news industry now accepts "AI is here to stay" and better understands where its use is appropriate and "when it might not, such as in writing and editing stories in any format that might be considered for a Pulitzer Prize." The disclosure rule will also cover book entries starting next year.

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Nieman Lab