KPMG AI report exposes dangers of AI hallucinations with only 5 of 45 citations accurate

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

GPTZero claims only 5 of the report's 45 citations matched their sources, raising questions about how the Big Four's AI study was assembled KPMG's October 2025 report on the wonders of agentic AI has been accused of demonstrating one of the tech's less desirable talents: making things up. Research outfit GPTZero claims a forensic review of the Big Four firm's October 2025 report, "Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI," found that only five of its 45 citations correctly pointed to the cited source; the rest ranged from mangled and misleading to partially fabricated or too vague to verify. The consulting industry has form here. Last year, Deloitte ended up refunding the Australian government after AI-generated content slipped into a taxpayer-funded report. GPTZero dubbed the phenomenon "vibe citing" - the citation equivalent of vibe coding - where generative AI appears to stitch together fragments of real sources, invent titles, or otherwise produce references that look convincing until someone actually clicks them. GPTZero alleges that roughly half of the report's factual claims were false, unsupported, or attributed to the wrong source. Several case studies highlighting supposedly cutting-edge deployments of agentic AI appear to have been particularly creative. Among the examples highlighted by GPTZero were purported agentic AI deployments at UBS, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London. According to GPTZero, the sources cited to support those case studies either did not substantiate the report's claims or contained alterations and paraphrasing that undermined their reliability. "These factual errors are not confined to the report's footnoted passages," GPTZero said. "On page 42, the authors claim that Emirates airline has adopted a mobile chatbot named Sara (false) that can converse directly with passengers (partially true) and change their flights (false). In fact, Sara is a robot assistant introduced by Emirates in 2023 (not a chatbot) that lacks the ability to alter flight bookings." Not all of the alleged problems involved external sources. GPTZero noted that the report appears to contradict KPMG's own research, citing a figure of 55 percent of CEOs ranking AI as their top investment priority. KPMG's 2025 CEO Outlook, released the same month, put the number at 71 percent. KPMG has since removed the report from some of its websites while it investigates how the publication made it into the wild, according to the Financial Times. The firm did not respond to The Register's questions. Consulting firms have spent years warning clients about AI hallucinations. According to GPTZero, KPMG may have just provided a live demonstration. ®

A major KPMG report on AI was found to be chock-full of...AI hallucinations

* Only five of the 45 citations accurately reflected real sources * Some were totally fake, others included "garbled" attributions and titles * GPTZero argues vibe citations have consequences, with reports disseminated globally GPTZero investigators have revealed how major government reports, academic papers and other research are becoming plagued with AI hallucinations, so much so that the company is on its second report exploring the trend. In the latest embarassing incident, a KPMG report on agentic AI was in fact found to be filled with AI-generated errors, false citations and misleading case studies. "Of the 45 citations in the report, only five accurately point to real sources," the team wrote, adding that many others were either totally false or significantly distorted. AI report filled with AI hallucinations GPTZero used the term 'vibe citing' to refer to false citations, where generative AI appeared to have created false references that looked plausible. The report also included odd mixes of real references, like wrong attributions or paraphrased titles. "A human would not consistently paraphrase titles, mistake topics for authors or repeat information across multiple components," they added. Though the researchers make arguments for and against vibe citing, they ultimately conclude that it should still be considered hallucination and that "vibes have consequences." In this case, they argue that KPMG has so much influence that its findings are likely to be cited globally, across news reports, blog posts and other conversations, driving the dissemination of potential misinformation. They also worry that the report is being cited in LLMs, spreading the information even further. It follows a similar 2025 report revealing that a study from the US Presidential Commission to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) also included "garbled or fabricated" footnotes. "GPTZero contends that vibe citations are a clear and present danger to researchers, academics, consultants, students, and anybody else who happens to search the internet for information," the company concludes. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.