The Big Four giant PwC has been found to have published four ‘thought leadership’ reports that show a pattern of irresponsible AI usage, including hallucinated citations and fabricated claims.
A probe by GPTZero, a company that makes AI detection software, focused on four reports published between 2024 and 2026 by PwC Middle East and found they were riddled with unverifiable information, with one of the reports flagged as 100 per cent AI-generated.
According to the AI detection firm, there was an 84 per cent chance that PwC’s 2025 report ‘Transforming Governance’ was entirely AI-generated, rising to 100 per cent when excluding the reference section.
This report, which promoted a PwC data-driven framework called ‘Citizen Pulse’, claimed it was being used by the governments of Denmark, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Australia. However, GPTZero found no public evidence that this product was used, nor that these government deals ever took place.
Paul Esau, Om Ogale, and Alex Cui of GPTZero pointed out that the citations of this report didn’t “follow the normal academic or consultancy conventions”, as only 10 of the 17 citations in the references section are numbered and actually correspond to footnotes in the body of the report.
“Additionally, the report seems unsure if ‘Citizen Pulse’ is an existing PwC product or a vague exercise in thought leadership, cycling between describing the potential benefits of the Citizen Pulse framework and concrete claims about current use. This inconsistency is a common symptom of text generated by a poorly-prompted LLM,” Om Ogale said.
The other three PwC Middle East reports covered by this investigation “also contain multiple fabricated claims”, according to the company, including conflating statistics, citing unrelated sources, and confidently asserting false correlations. One of the reports, ‘Building a Cyber-Resilient eMobility Ecosystem’, included a URL in a citation that cited ChatGPT.
In response to the findings, a spokesperson for PwC Middle East said: “PwC Middle East takes the accuracy of our published research seriously and is updating a limited number of supporting citations in the reports mentioned. Consistent with our approach to Responsible AI, we have quality control processes for research and content development we expect all our people to adhere to.”
Big Four’s growing AI problem #
Last month, another investigation by GPTZero revealed that a major KPMG report on agentic AI was riddled with AI-generated hallucinations and fake citations. In May, EY had to withdraw a study it had done on loyalty rewards programmes after a probe revealed it contained apparent AI hallucinations and fake footnotes.
Elsewhere, fellow Big Four firm giant, Deloitte, had to issue a partial refund to the Australian federal government last October after a report it issued contained several errors caused by the use of AI.