KPMG publishes AI report riddled with AI hallucinations, fake citations, and non-existent products

In October 2025, KPMG — one of the world's "Big Four" accounting firms — published a report titled Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI, intended to showcase how companies are deploying AI to serve customers. Investigators from GPTZero later found that only 5 of the report's 45 citations pointed to real sources; 28 paraphrased or fabricated components of real sources, and 12 were too vague to verify. Roughly half the paper's claims were fake or misattributed, including assertions that Emirates runs an AI chatbot capable of altering flights (it doesn't), that UBS has deployed agentic AI across investment advisory and compliance (the bank called this "factually incorrect"), and that Swiss Federal Railways uses AI agents to optimize trips by carbon impact (also "not accurate").

GPTZero coined the term "vibe citing" for AI models' habit of generating plausible-sounding but fabricated references. The stakes here go beyond embarrassment: KPMG-branded research is routinely cited by other firms and academics as a trusted source, meaning hallucinated claims could propagate through the broader knowledge ecosystem — what GPTZero's CEO called "poisoning the well of information." KPMG has since pulled the report and says it is "reviewing the circumstances surrounding its publication."