GPTZero said three Accenture publications held 31 hallucinated citations. One fake link led to real malware, it said.
GPTZero, an AI-detection firm, reported on 4 November 2026 that it found 31 hallucinated citations out of 245 across three Accenture publications.
It said a real human verified each one.
The largest count was in a November 2025 policy paper on AI in Africa's value chains, written by Accenture Africa with IE University: 15 of its 89 sources. Two research papers from May 2026 held 7 of 102 and 9 of 54.
In one, a reference meant to back a claim about a malicious chatbot called "FraudGPT" linked to a fake GitHub repository that, GPTZero said, contained real malware. Another eight citations were flawed in ways GPTZero called "indicative of LLM generation".
GPTZero cautioned that its tools "do not definitively prove" an AI model wrote the papers, but said they provide "significant circumstantial evidence". The Financial Times reported the findings the same day under the headline "Accenture accused of publishing AI paper littered with AI hallucinations".
GPTZero's report carries no response from Accenture and does not say whether any paper was corrected or withdrawn.
For anyone who buys research from a system integrator, 31 of 245 is about one source in eight.
Sources
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