Consulting giant PwC has published reports on AI and electric vehicles that contained fake footnotes, fabricated claims and strange formatting decisions likely resulting from irresponsible AI usage, according to an investigation by GPTZero.
The investigation analysed four reports published between 2024 and 2026 by PwC member firm PwC Middle East. It found what the researchers described as “a pattern of irresponsible AI usage resulting in hallucinated (vibe) citations, fabricated claims, and incomprehensible drafting and formatting decisions.”
The worst offender was a report on transforming governance promoting a PwC framework known as “Citizen Pulse”. The research team were unable to find public evidence that this framework exists outside of this report.
The report has since been removed from PwC’s website.
Despite a lack of public evidence, the report claimed that the framework is used by the governments of Denmark, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Australia to improve key government services. The sources provided in the report do not shed any light on these claims.
The GPTZero researchers suggested that Citizen Pulse may be the result of an AI research tool conflating a variety of concepts and products with similar names and ultimately creating an amalgamation that does not exist.
The company’s AI detector tool, which itself is not guaranteed to be accurate or immune to hallucination, suggests that there is an 84 per cent chance that the entirety of this report was AI generated, increasing to 100 per cent if the endmatter, including references, is removed.
Although the other reports were not found to contain as much AI-generated content, they similarly included citations that did not support the claims they made, conflated statistics, and links that appear to have been sourced by AI tools.
PwC has not immediately responded to a request for comment.
This is the latest GPTZero investigation to reveal AI usage by Big Four consultancies. Earlier in the year rival groups EY and KMPG have both retracted reports that appeared to contain AI after research by the company.
