arXiv Computation and Language By Duy K. Nguyen, Teresa Mondr\'ia Terol, Dylan Freedman, Zach Seward

Epstein Files Engine: Agentic Search for Investigative Journalism

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The Epstein Files Engine is an AI agent developed by the New York Times to help journalists investigate a massive mixed‑media collection released by the U.S. Department of Justice on January 30, 2026, which contains about three million pages of PDFs related to Jeffrey Epstein. The Engine translates reporter questions into Google BigQuery SQL queries across three corpora—Epstein‑related releases, the Times’s archive, and external Epstein‑related news headlines—using an LLM to plan queries and return citation‑rich answers that reporters can verify. Over 100 journalists used the Engine, contributing to at least 20 published stories, and the system includes a Diff method for text‑and‑visual duplicate matching to surface genuinely new information.

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