Oct 6, 2025Confirmed
Deloitte refunds part of an AU$440,000 Australian government report over AI-fabricated citations
AI loose in the worldMisinformationDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
A Deloitte report for Australia's Department of Employment and Workplace Relations on the welfare compliance system was found to contain fabricated academic citations, a made-up Federal Court quote, and other AI-hallucinated references, first flagged by University of Sydney academic Chris Rudge. Deloitte admitted generative AI (Azure OpenAI GPT-4o) was used, reissued a corrected report, and agreed to repay the final instalment of its AU$440,000 fee.
What this means for youIf you rely on consultant reports paid for with public money, ask whether AI was used and whether the sources were checked. Governments that buy reports should require disclosure of AI use and verification of references.
Sources
- OECD.AI Incidents Monitorhttps://oecd.ai/en/incidents/2025-10-05-be45
Incident records from the AI Agent Incident Database by sipi.bot (https://sipi.bot/incidents/), licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Source data license: CC BY 4.0. Attribution to sipi.bot is required.
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 2323. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify