LLMMedium
South Africa Draft National AI Policy Reportedly Included Fictitious References Believed to Be AI Hallucinations
- Occurred
- Apr 10, 2026
- Published
- Apr 25, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
South Africa's Draft National AI Policy, gazetted for public comment, reportedly contained at least six fictitious academic references. Several cited articles or journals reportedly did not exist or were disclaimed by journal editors, and experts said the errors were consistent with AI hallucinations. The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies said it was reviewing the discrepancies but argued they did not affect the draft's substance.
Developers
- Large language model developers
- Generative AI developers
Deployers
- Government of South Africa
- Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (South Africa)
Harmed parties
- General public of South Africa
- General public
- Epistemic integrity
- AI policy stakeholders
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: AI hallucinations caused fictitious references in official policy document, representing notable failure without major harm.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8