A Big Four accounting and consulting giant, PwC, has come under fire after an investigation revealed that several of its Middle Eastern “thought leadership” reports contained AI-generated “hallucinations,” fabricated footnotes and chatbot citations, including a reference that listed ChatGPT directly in its source URL. The findings, uncovered by researchers at AI-detection platform GPTZero and verified by the Financial Times, flagged four PwC Middle East reports published over the past two years. Researchers found that a significant portion of the citations were flawed; for example, one report cited a study on air quality in Riyadh that appears to be completely hallucinated by AI. In a second incident, multiple footnotes linked to broken web pages or articles that contained no mention of the claims they were supposed to support. To support a “real-world success story” about a JPMorgan AI initiative, PwC cited a teenage blogger on Medium with just 280 followers, while the actual initiative took place in 2017. A single claim regarding traffic accidents was repeated three times across two pages, with each instance featuring entirely different citations. In one footnote, the URL for a cybersecurity report included the tracking tag utm_source=chatgpt.com. PwC Middle East said it “takes the accuracy of our published research seriously and is updating a limited number of supporting citations.” Previous investigations led rivals EY and KPMG to retract published research papers after similar hallucinations were uncovered.