KPMG pulls AI report after organizations expose widespread hallucinations and fake citations

KPMG pulls report on AI usage due to apparent hallucinations

Professional services firm KPMG has pulled a report titled, "Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI," after numerous organizations said the report's claims about their AI usage were untrue. Research group GPTZero identified a number of inaccuracies in the report, which was published in October 2025. GPTZero told the FT that the inaccuracies stemmed from AI hallucinations. In other words, the professional services firm appears to have used AI to help write a report about AI. UBS, the UK's National Health Service, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London all told the FT that the report's claims about their AI usage were either untrue or misleading. A KPMG spokesperson said the firm removed the report from its websites while conducting its own investigation. "We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources," the spokesperson said. Last month, EY withdrew a report on loyalty rewards programs that appeared to include fake footnotes and AI hallucinations.

KPMG Allegedly Published AI Report Filled With Hallucinations

Are you interested in learning from human experts about how AI could impact the future of work and customer experience? If you are, it turns out that you could have unknowingly been getting some of your responses from an AI. KPMG, one of the largest consultancy firms in the world, is accused of publishing a report on the future of AI that had 40 citations that appeared to be at least partially AI hallucinations, out of the 45 in the entire document. In one instance, uncovered by AI-safety firm GPTZero, the report claims that Japanese East Japan Railway Company (JR East) is using agentic AI for customer service, before linking to a press release from 2019 -- half a decade before agentic AI became mainstream. In another instance, the report falsely claimed that Austrian electricity provider Verbund is using AI agents in households to conduct real-time analytics as part of its "energy-as-a-service ecosystem." Though Verbund did invest in a start-up using agents for grid optimization, there was no evidence of the above claims. Many citations linked to existing studies, but the title, author or date were incorrect. Researchers were unable to match many citations to an existing study due to a lack of information. If the researchers' allegations are true, this has had knock-on effects far beyond the original article. The report, which has now been taken down, has been referenced by multiple customer service publications and a major newspaper in the Czech Republic. In addition, researchers noted how the paper is now being referenced as a resource on customer experience by OpenAI's ChatGPT as well as Google Gemini. GPTZero alleges that an LLM research tool was asked to find appropriate case studies of companies using agentic AI across the world. "This tool seems to have conflated sources, exaggerated claims, and injected references to agentic AI that were copied into the final report without verification," read the report. The researchers "suspect no human at KPMG double-checked the citations, the claims, or the sources" before the report was published. "The report has been removed and we are reviewing the circumstances surrounding its publication," a KPMG spokesperson told The Financial Times. "We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources." KPMG isn't the only major consulting firm to have suffered blowback from allegations of AI hallucinations in its work. In October 2025, the Australian government ordered Deloitte to refund a portion of the $290,000 (AU$440,000) it was paid for a compliance report after discovering several incorrect citations that appeared to be AI hallucinations, and a fabricated quote. The problem is already being felt by the average worker. More than 40% of US desk workers reported receiving "workslop" -- low-quality AI-generated content -- in the past month, according to a new survey by the Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs.

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 report on the benefits of AI was reportedly full of AI hallucinations - Engadget

It was published by KPMG, one of the world's 'Big Four' accounting firms. In October last year, KPMG published a report titled Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI, which was about how companies are using AI to cater to customers' needs. KPMG is one of the "Big Four" professional services and accounting firms in the world, along with Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young. Apparently, though, that report was full of AI hallucinations and included examples of agentic AIs that either did not exist or did not have the capabilities KPMG stated in the paper. Investigators for GPTZero, the maker of an AI content detection tool, found inaccuracies and fake footnotes all over the report, which were also verified by the Financial Times. In its report of the investigation, GPTZero said that only five citations out of 45 in the paper accurately pointed to real sources. A total of 28 citations paraphrased titles or added fake components to real sources, while 12 were phrased too vaguely to determine whether they actually existed. GPTZero called the creation of fake references by AI models "vibe citing." In addition to the fake or inaccurate citations, the investigators also found that approximately half of the claims in the paper were fake or misattributed. They were "likely the result of an AI research tool over-complying with a request to find examples of 'agentic AI' in the wild," GPTZero wrote. In one example, KPMG claimed that Emirates launched a mobile chatbot called Sara that can talk to passengers and alter their flights for them. Sara was a mobile assistant launched in 2023 and not an AI-powered chatbot, and it also didn't have the power to change bookings for passengers. KPMG also claimed that Swiss multinational investment bank UBS integrated agentic AI across its "investment advisory, risk management and compliance monitoring." The bank told the Times that the information was "factually incorrect." In another example, KMPG said that Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) has AI agents that can help passengers plan, book and optimize their trips based on preferences, real-time conditions and carbon impact. An SBB spokesperson said that was "not accurate." Papers by companies like KPMG are typically cited in other research papers and articles, since they're considered as highly trusted sources. GPTZero chief executive Edward Tian explained that error-riddled papers published by the Big Four could "poison the well of information" and could lead to second-hand AI hallucinations. A KPMG spokesperson told the Times that the company "takes the accuracy and integrity of its published content seriously." KPMG has since pulled the paper and is now "reviewing the circumstances surrounding its publication."

KPMG pulled its AI report after UBS, the NHS, and others said its claims about them were made up

KPMG has pulled a report titled "Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI" after multiple organisations said the claims it made about their AI usage were either untrue or misleading. UBS, the UK's National Health Service, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London all told the Financial Times that the report's descriptions of their AI deployments were wrong. GPTZero, the AI detection firm, identified the inaccuracies and told the FT they stemmed from AI hallucinations. In other words, a professional services firm used AI to help write a report about AI, and the AI made things up about the companies it was supposedly analysing. The report was published in October 2025 and has now been removed from KPMG's websites. A spokesperson said the firm is conducting its own investigation. "We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources," the spokesperson said. KPMG is not the first professional services firm to get caught. Last month, EY withdrew a report on loyalty rewards programmes that appeared to include fake footnotes and AI hallucinations. South Africa withdrew its entire national AI policy after at least six of its 67 academic citations were found to be AI-generated fabrications. The pattern is consistent: organisations use AI to produce authoritative-looking content, skip the verification step, and publish claims that turn out to be fictional. The KPMG case is particularly embarrassing because the report was specifically about AI adoption, meaning the subject matter should have made the authors more careful about AI-generated errors, not less. For KPMG's clients, the incident raises a harder question. If the firm's public-facing thought leadership uses AI without adequate human review, what level of oversight applies to the work it delivers under contract? KPMG partnered with Anthropic earlier this year to deploy Claude across all 276,000 staff. The partnership is designed to embed AI into advisory, audit, and tax work. The pulled report is a preview of what happens when that embedding outpaces the verification.

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.

Consulting Firm's Report on How Awesome AI Is Found to Contain Idiotic AI Hallucinations

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech A new report that was supposed to be a shining panegyric to how useful AI is was caught loaded with fake claims that appear to be AI hallucinations, the Financial Times reports -- a blunder that may have unintentionally demonstrated AI's most compelling use case: bullsh*tting your job. Titled "Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI," the report was released October by KPMG, one of the big four consulting firms, making the mishap an all the more embarrassing indictment of elite Wall Street professionals' mindless enthusiasm for the tech. It claimed that numerous big organizations are already making extraordinary use of the tech, with the takeaway that you should be deploying AI, too, lest you become one of those dinosaurs that still relies on the fleshy circuitry of the brain to synthesize information. The global wealth manager UBS "integrates AI agents across investment advisory, risk management and compliance monitoring," it stated. The Swiss Federal Railways has AI agents that "help users plan, book, and optimize journeys based on preferences, real-time conditions and carbon impact, turning SBB into a holistic mobility orchestrator," it further asserted. And the Transport for London was using AI agents "to predict and manage congestion, personalize commuter updates and co-ordinate multimodal transport." AI evangelists, never above shameless boosterism and misleading claims, would desperately hope for any of these things to be true. But as the FT was tipped off by AI detecting startup GPTZero, they're not. A UBS spokesperson told the FT that the claims about AI agents were "factually incorrect." A Swiss railway spokesperson echoed that the claims made about its AI usage were "not accurate." And a spokesperson for the London transit system called the report's assertion "misleading." The provenance of another false claim, that the NHS Greater Manchester uses AI agents to do everything from triage patients and predict hospital readmissions, is a classic game of AI telephone. It appeared to be based on a press release, with footnotes citing a communiqué about an AI tool designed to combat lung cancer -- which had nothing to do about an AI agent performing the above hospital tasks, according to the FT. KPMG pulled the report from its websites after it was alerted about the bogus claims, but the damage is done: its findings were already cited by industry publications and a major Czech newspaper, GPTZero found. For AI fabrications to be trickling down from a consultancy of KPMG's stature "poison the well of information," GPTZero CEO Edward Tian told the FT, increasing "the risk of second-hand hallucinations." Like in many white collar fields, AI has caused a bit of an existential panic at consulting firms, which fear that it could outmode their profession. But, free thinkers all, their response generally has been to embrace it like everyone else is. McKinsey reportedly deployed 12,000 AI agents across the company last year, shortly after laying off some five thousand employees. This is far from the only example of how these efforts can backfire. Lawyers, including those at white shoe law firms, have been repeatedly caught submitting court filings riddled with fake case law and misattributed quotes that turned out to be hallucinated by an AI tool, incurring the admonishment of the judge.

KPMG Sells 'AI Trust' to Clients -- but It Just Pulled Its Own Report Over Alleged AI Hallucinations

KPMG advises companies on responsible uses for artificial intelligence. Yet, its own report did not meet that standard. KPMG withdrew a report about agentic AI after UBS, NHS Greater Manchester, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London said information about their use of the technology was incorrect or misleading. Whether AI generated the errors remains unproven. The clearer failure is that the problems were not caught before the consulting firm published the report. KPMG offers "AI Trust" services to help companies design, build, and deploy agentic AI responsibly. Agentic systems are designed to plan and perform tasks with limited human involvement, making oversight and accountability particularly important.

Inside KPMG's AI report scandal: False claims, bogus case studies and hallucinated success stories

KPMG has retracted a global report after major organizations like UBS and the NHS denied claims of using AI for operational transformations. The report, which contained fabricated case studies and AI-generated inaccuracies, was flagged by GPTZero and the Financial Times. An internal investigation is underway as the firm faces scrutiny over its AI usage policies. KPMG has been left red-faced after being forced to pull a major global report packed with claims that some of the world's biggest organisations say were completely made up. The professional services giant published a glossy report titled *Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI*, boasting about how leading companies were supposedly using cutting-edge artificial intelligence to transform their operations. There was just one problem -- many of the success stories never happened. According to the *Financial Times*, the report contained a string of fabricated case studies and false claims that appear to have been generated by AI "hallucinations" -- when artificial intelligence confidently invents facts that aren't true. The blunders were first flagged by tech research firm GPTZero and later verified by the *Financial Times*. Once alerted, several high-profile organisations demanded KPMG take the report down immediately. Big Names Say: "That's Not Us" Among those challenging the report were Swiss banking giant UBS, the UK's National Health Service (NHS), Swiss Federal Railways and Transport for London (TfL). UBS: 'Factually Incorrect' KPMG claimed UBS had rolled out sophisticated AI agents across its investment advisory and risk management systems through a custom Microsoft-built platform. UBS wasn't having it. A spokesperson reportedly slammed the claims as "factually incorrect" and demanded they be removed. Swiss Railways: 'Not Accurate' The report also claimed Switzerland's national rail operator was using AI agents to help passengers plan and book journeys based on real-time travel conditions and carbon emissions. Rail officials swiftly shot down the story, saying the claims were simply "not accurate". London Transport: 'Misleading' Transport for London was allegedly using AI agents to predict congestion and coordinate the capital's transport network, according to KPMG. TfL described the claims as "misleading". NHS: 'Doesn't Really Align' Perhaps most eyebrow-raising were claims that NHS Greater Manchester was using AI agents to organise patient records, automate referrals and predict hospital readmissions. Health officials responded bluntly, saying the description "doesn't really align" with reality. 'Poisoning the Well' The scandal comes just weeks after rival consulting giant EY was forced to withdraw a study containing fake footnotes and AI-generated errors, also uncovered by GPTZero. GPTZero chief executive Edward Tian warned that mistakes from trusted firms can spread misinformation far and wide. "They poison the well of information," Tian said, noting that KPMG's bogus findings had already been cited by technology publications and even a major European newspaper before the report disappeared. KPMG International has now removed the report and launched an internal investigation. A spokesperson said the company takes the "accuracy and integrity" of its publications seriously and admitted employees may have breached internal AI-use policies. "We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources," the spokesperson said. For a firm built on trust and expertise, the embarrassing episode raises uncomfortable questions about whether the rush to embrace AI is outpacing basic fact-checking.

KPMG Withdraws AI Usage Report Because Its AI May Have Hallucinated

This isn't the first time that these professional services are being caught out for using AI slop in their reports Research and professional services company KPMG had egg on its face last week when they had to recall a report titled "Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI" after several companies reported that many of the claims made on AI usage was not true. A report published by the Financial Times claimed that it was a research group called GPTZero that identified the inaccuracies in the report that was dated October 2025. In fact, the company also claimed that the reason for these errors stemmed from AI hallucinations. Which indirectly indicates (or maybe directly so)that the professional services company might just have used AI to help them write a report. Yikes! In fact, the report published by FT cited several agencies such as the National Health Service, the Swiss Federal Railways, and London Transport as claiming that claims made by KPMG of their AI usage were untrue or quite misleading. However, all that they got from KPMG was that the company had removed the report and was conducting a probe. "We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources," the spokesperson had said. Readers may recall that this isn't an isolated incident of research and professional services companies resorting to AI as a shortcut to their report formation. Last month EY too had withdrawn a study on loyalty rewards programs that apparently included AI hallucinations and fake footnotes. The study was used by EY consultants in Canada to market their cyber security business. The only problem was that the AI chatbot they used actually made up the data and mis-attributed citations. However, what proved to be the craziest hallucination by that AI chatbot related to it referencing a McKinsey report that did not exist. Of course, EY Canada too removed the study titled "Points of Attack: Uncovering Cyber Threats and Fraud in Loyalty Systems" from its website, which incidentally were once again reported by GPTZero. Once again their researchers called out the report for relying on erroneous and inconsistent data to make their case that loyalty schemes were vulnerable to fraud. At several points in the report, the size of the loyalty scheme market was estimated to be $200 billion while the number of unclaimed points also came to the exact same size.

KPMG AI Report Row: Firms Expose False Claims, Forcing Sudden Withdrawal

Global consulting firm KPMG has removed its Agentic AI report after several companies raised serious concerns about its content. The report claimed that many organizations used advanced AI systems, but those organizations later denied the claims. The issue started when the research group GPTZero found problems in the report. The group checked many references and discovered that several examples did not match real-world facts. Many sections appeared to be generated by AI tools without proper verification.