FILE – Solly Solomon Malatsi during the swearing-in ceremony of the new national executive members at Cape Town International Convention Centre on July 03, 2024 in Cape Town, South Africa. [File photo: CNBC]
- South Africa’s AI policy was pulled after AI hallucinations fabricated at least six of its 67 academic citations, journals and authors that simply don’t exist.
- The policy itself was ambitious, proposing five new oversight bodies including a National AI Commission and a Road Accident Fund-style AI Insurance Superfund to compensate citizens harmed by AI.
- With no timeline for a revised draft, the scandal leaves South Africa’s digital economy in regulatory limbo and hands the continent a stark warning about unsupervised AI use in government.
In a deeply ironic turn of events that has reverberated across South Africa, Communications and Digital Technologies Minister Solly Malatsi has withdrawn the country’s Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy after it was discovered that the document contained fictitious sources in its reference list. The scandal broke when News24 reported that the policy document cited academic journal articles that don’t exist, with several authors credited with foundational research who had never written on the topics attributed to them.
The blunder is particularly stinging given that the policy was designed to govern the very technology that appears to have sabotaged it.
A policy drafted on phantom research
The draft policy had been approved by Cabinet on March 25 and April 1, and was published in the Government Gazette on 10 April 2026 for public comment, with submissions open until 10 June 2026. It had cleared the highest levels of government , including President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet, before anyone checked whether its academic foundation was real.
Some of the 67 references listed in the draft either do not exist or point to articles not published in recognised journals. Editors of the South African Journal of Philosophy, AI & Society and the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy independently confirmed to News24 that articles credited to their publications had never been published there.
The diagnosis was almost immediate: AI hallucinations. The drafters appeared to have fed prompts into a generative AI tool, the same category of technology the policy was meant to govern, and published the output without verifying a single citation.
The minister responds
In a statement posted to his X account on Sunday, Malatsi did not mince words. “This failure is not a mere technical issue but has compromised the integrity and credibility of the draft policy,” he said, adding that the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies “did not deliver on the standard expected of an institution entrusted with the role to lead South Africa’s digital policy environment.”
He said the most plausible explanation was that AI-generated sources had been included without proper verification, calling it an “unacceptable lapse” that underscores why “vigilant human oversight over the use of artificial intelligence is critical.”
What the policyprroposed
Despite the manner of its undoing, the substance of South Africa’s AI ambitions was genuinely sweeping. The Draft AI Policy proposed the establishment of a new AI governance ecosystem, including a National AI Commission, an AI Ethics Board, an AI Regulatory Authority, an AI Ombudsperson, a National AI Safety Institute, and a proposed AI Insurance Superfund intended to compensate individuals harmed by AI systems where liability is uncertain.
The AI Insurance Superfund was modelled on the Road Accident Fund, designed to compensate individuals or entities harmed by AI systems where liability is difficult to determine.
The policy also called for AI to be integrated into school curricula from primary to tertiary education, for community-based AI education centres to be established in underserved areas, and for a labour market transition strategy to manage job displacement. On infrastructure, it proposed investment in supercomputing facilities, 5G and future 6G networks, high-capacity fibre and last-mile connectivity via low-Earth-orbit satellites, and went as far as framing universal internet access as a “socioeconomic right.”
The policy also sought to align AI governance with POPIA, with specific reference to automated decision-making, and promoted data protection by design as a baseline requirement, alongside mandatory watermarking of training data for large language models and cross-border data flow protocols to protect data sovereignty.
Crucially, the department itself acknowledged the document’s provisional nature. An explanatory note published alongside the policy described it as “a work in progress” and said the government’s final approach “will require extensive external consultations with both local and international experts and interest groups.”
Political fallout
The scandal triggered a swift cross-party political backlash. Parliament’s communications committee chair, Khusela Diko, urged Malatsi to withdraw the draft amid credibility concerns, underscoring the political pressure surrounding the policy process.
Opposition politicians rejected the suggestion implicit in Malatsi’s response that responsibility could be pinned on a junior official, arguing that the failure of due diligence sat squarely with both the department and the ministry. The affair was also compared to a recent scandal in which Deloitte was forced to refund the Australian government over an AI-assisted report containing fabricated citations.
BroaderiImplications for Africa
South Africa is one of the few African countries to have developed AI policy, even as the adoption of the technology continues to spread rapidly across the continent. The withdrawal means the country must now restart substantial portions of the consultation process, with no immediate timeline provided for a revised draft.
The episode also arrives at an awkward moment globally. Governments worldwide are racing to regulate AI, often relying on the very tools they are trying to govern to help draft legislation and policy. South Africa’s experience now stands as a cautionary reference point: the irony of an AI policy hallucinating its own academic foundations is not merely embarrassing, it is a structural warning about the risks of deploying AI in high-stakes governance work without rigorous human verification.
Minister Malatsi has promised it will return with “much more rigorous oversight.” The country, and the continent, will be watching closely.
Statement on the integrity of the Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy
Following revelations that the Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy published for public comment contains various fictitious sources in its reference list, we initiated internal questions…
— SollyMalatsi (@SollyMalatsi) April 26, 2026
Source: CNBC Africa
