South Africa's government withdrew its draft national AI policy after discovering that at least six of the document's 67 academic citations were fabricated by AI — referencing journal articles that don't actually exist. Minister Solly Malatsi called it a failure that compromised the policy's integrity and acknowledged the need for human oversight of AI systems. The incident reflects a broader problem: a Nature study found over 110,000 academic papers published in 2025 contained at least one hallucinated citation, compared to just tens of thousands in 2024, as large language models confidently generate plausible-sounding but false references when their training data is thin.