Comment by Spivak

I think so, but I'm not actually sure that any of the realities that would have lead to this outcome is any less embarrassing for the administration. Because there is real information contained in the fact that pretty much every LLM gives roughly the same answer— it doesn't help that the wording is similar either. Does it mean that they used an LLM? No not really, but it does strongly imply that their formula and the source for it are the "StackOverflow answer" for lack of a better term.

And while it's not wrong I guess it's also the kind of thing that you would expect to use for your econ homework than a real application of policy. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the person who made this spreadsheet really did do something to the effect of type "how to calculate reciprocal tariffs" into Google. And that's not a bad thing necessarily if you're a rando who's just been tasked with figuring that out but you couldn't have found someone with more experience with actually doing this and modeling the economic effects?

I think that it's a testament to the genuinely breakneck speeds they been trying to get policy out there that it's been so slapdash.