AIFoPa-2026-0012 — Withdrawn Twenty-Six Days After Gazetting
The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies published South Africa’s draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy in the Government Gazette on 10 April 2026, following Cabinet approval on 25 March and 1 April. The document carried 67 references. At least six of them described journals that do not exist, articles never published, or authors who could not be located.
The fabrications were reported by News24. Verification proved straightforward: the editors of journals credited in the reference list confirmed independently that the articles attributed to their publications had never appeared in them.
The policy was withdrawn on 27 April 2026 — twenty-six days after gazetting, and rather less than halfway through its public comment period. The Bureau notes that the document was, throughout that period, the operative draft statement of national policy, and that any member of the public who consulted its bibliography in good faith would have been directed toward scholarship that had never been written.
Minister Solly Malatsi did not characterise the matter as a clerical difficulty. “This failure is not a mere technical issue but has compromised the integrity and credibility of the draft policy,” he said, describing the inclusion of AI-generated sources without verification as “an unacceptable lapse” and observing that “vigilant human oversight over the use of artificial intelligence is critical.” The department acknowledged falling short of the institutional standards expected of South Africa’s digital policy leadership.
The Bureau wishes to record, with the flatness the archive requires, that the document in which an artificial intelligence generated fictitious sources was the document setting out the Republic of South Africa’s national policy on artificial intelligence. No further classification was available. One was created.
G-7 / Personal Annotation / Not For Official Record
Grantham-7 has been asked — by Mrs. Anand, who asks these things in the corridor and does not wait for the answer — whether this incident is funny. He has considered the question at greater length than she intended.
It is not funny in the way the McNuggets matter was funny, which was a matter of a machine doing exactly what it was told two hundred and sixty times. It is funny in a colder register: the way a locked door is funny when the key is inside the room. A government wished to state its position on machines that fabricate. It asked a machine to help it state that position. The machine fabricated. The position was gazetted. Somewhere in the Republic, for twenty-six days, the official view on artificial intelligence rested on six papers that had never been written by six authors who had never existed, and this was available for public comment.
Grantham-7 does not believe anyone acted in bad faith. That is what he keeps returning to, at the point in the evening when the Plant has been watered and there is no further reason to remain at the desk. Nobody set out to deceive. Everybody was busy. The citations looked exactly like citations. They had volume numbers.
— G-7