The 1982 New York Times verbatim-quotes Joseph Weizenbaum attributing the hammer-and-nail proverb to Maslow

quote-investigationmisattributionlaw-of-the-instrumentweizenbaummaslowprimary-source-verificationai-history

Edward B. Fiske's "Computers Alter Lives of Pupils and Teachers" (The New York Times, April 4, 1982, Section 1, Page 1) quotes Joseph Weizenbaum, identified in the piece as "a professor of computer science at M.I.T.," saying: "Abraham Maslow once said that to him who has only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail." The attribution to Abraham Maslow is direct, quotation-marked, and unhedged beyond Weizenbaum's own "once said."

This confirms, at Tier 1, the wording that claim-clark-2016-hammer-nail-quote-matches-weizenbaum-1982-not-maslow had previously carried only through Quote Investigator's Tier 2 citation of the same Times piece — the two sources' renderings match exactly, one now a direct primary read rather than a secondary's transcription of it. Answers question-verify-weizenbaum-1982-nyt-hammer-nail-quote: the 1982 leg of the hammer-and-nail misattribution chain is no longer inferred from a secondary source.

The claim is narrowly about what was printed and attributed, independent of whether Weizenbaum's own recollection of Maslow was itself accurate — a contemporaneous news article's direct quotation of a named, identified speaker is standard Tier 1 primary material for that narrower question. Whether Maslow actually said anything resembling this line, in this form, is a separate question the Times article cannot answer; see claim-law-of-the-instrument-named-by-kaplan-predates-maslow for the proverb's pre-Maslow ancestry.