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KPMG Pulls Agentic AI Report After 40 of 45 Citations Found Faulty

June 14, 2026 at 23:42 EDT

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KPMG International has retracted its October 2025 report "Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI" after GPTZero, a maker of AI-content detection tools, found that only 5 of the report's 45 citations correctly pointed to real sources, while the remaining 40 contained errors such as altered titles, misattributed authors, missing URLs and fabricated content.

October 2025 · KPMG International

A report on agentic AI became a demo of AI hallucinations

KPMG pulled its flagship customer-experience study and opened an investigation after researchers found that most of its 45 citations were fabricated, altered, or impossible to verify — in a report advising clients how to counter AI hallucinations.

total citations in the report

correctly pointed to real sources

~50%

of claims wrong, unsupported or misattributed

Breakdown of all 45 citations

altered or
fabricated

too vague
to verify

correct &
real

Only about 1 in 9 citations held up. Each block ≈ one citation.

"Vibe citing"

Fake citations stitched together from fragments of real sources, produced by an LLM overfitting to a prompt: "find examples of agentic AI."

Misstated AI use cases drew complaints from organizations including UBS, the UK's NHS, Swiss Federal Railways, Transport for London and Emirates — whose 2023 robot assistant "Sara" was falsely described as enabling flight changes by chatbot.

Not an isolated case

KPMG Pulled the report; internal review and stronger guidelines pledged.

EY Withdrew a loyalty report over fake footnotes a month earlier.

Deloitte Issued a refund after AI content surfaced in an Australian government report.

The takeaway

"Generation is cheap. Verification is the hard part."

The flawed report was cited by ChatGPT and Google Gemini and even spread to a national newspaper before it was caught.

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