3 min learnNew DelhiMight 17, 2026 04:14 PM IST
Accounting agency Ernst & Younger (EY) has retracted a latest examine after it was flagged for AI-generated hallucinations, together with faux footnotes.
The examine on loyalty rewards programmes was printed by EY consultants in Canada to market their cybersecurity enterprise. Nonetheless, the report supplied made-up knowledge factors, misattributed citations, and even cited a McKinsey report that doesn’t exist, researchers at AI detection startup GPT-Zero discovered.
In response, the accounting agency has eliminated the report from its web site and has stated that it’s “reviewing the circumstances that led to this text’s publication.” The examine was not related to tasks for any EY shopper, the corporate clarified.
The incident is the newest instance of an expert providers agency being led astray by AI. It additionally comes at a time when consulting companies are ramping up AI adoption internally by coaching workers to make use of AI instruments whereas selling their AI deployment providers to shoppers as effectively.
In October 2025, EY stated that its AI-related income had grown 30 per cent within the earlier yr and 15,000 workers had labored on shopper tasks “starting from delivering enterprise-wide transformations to AI governance frameworks that assist drive the accountable implementation of AI.”
“Publishing a report on-line is basically a type of knowledge injection into the pool of data that’s the web,” GPTZero researchers Om Ogale, Paul Esau and Alex Cui wrote in a weblog publish printed on Thursday, Might 14.
“When the report consists of faux info (both vibed citations or false claims) it may possibly ‘poison the effectively’ by deceptive future researchers, particularly if the report is printed by a well known consulting agency and hosted on a high traffic web site,” they added.
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“EY Canada takes the accuracy of all of the content material we publish severely, and we’ve got an organisation-wide dedication to the accountable use of AI,” EY stated.
Hallucinations proceed to be a key barrier to enterprise adoption of AI, and EY is just not the one firm to have run into issues due to it. As an illustration, one other large 4 consultancy agency, Deloitte, was pressured to right a report for a Canadian provincial authorities in 2025 after it was revealed to comprise faux educational citations.
In April this yr, legislation agency Sullivan & Cromwell apologised to a New York courtroom as a result of a submitting in a high-profile case repeatedly misquoted the US chapter code and cited instances incorrectly.