Questionable References in South Africa's Draft National AI Policy Raise AI Integrity Concerns

April 10, 2026

South Africa's Draft National AI Policy, now open for public comment, reportedly contained at least six suspicious academic references. Several purported articles or journals allegedly do not exist, and editors have disavowed them. Experts claim these inconsistencies resemble AI hallucinations. The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies acknowledges scrutiny of the discrepancies but maintains they do not undermine the draft's core principles. Through JOIN US, join the discussion on ensuring responsible AI governance and trustworthy AI practices in Project Cerebellum TAIM. Together, let's prioritize safe and secure AI for a future where AI is harnessed effectively and ethically.

Alleged deployer

department-of-communications-and-digital-technologies-(south-africa), government-of-south-africa

Alleged developer

unknown-generative-ai-developers, unknown-large-language-model-developers

Alleged harmed parties

epistemic-integrity, general-public, general-public-of-south-africa, ai-policy-stakeholders

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Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.