South Africa withdraws national AI policy after discovering fake academic citations

South Africa's Communications Minister Solly Malatsi on Monday withdrew the country's draft national artificial intelligence policy after an investigation found that at least six of its 67 academic citations were fabricated by a generative AI tool. The policy, which had been approved by Cabinet on 25 March and published for public comment on 10 April, proposed a National AI Commission, an AI Ethics Board, an AI Regulatory Authority, and other oversight bodies. It adopted a risk-based approach modelled on the EU AI Act. News24, a South African news outlet, checked the bibliography and discovered that the cited articles did not exist, even though the journals were real and the authors were real people who had never written the attributed papers. Editors at the South African Journal of Philosophy, AI & Society, and the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy independently confirmed to News24 that the cited articles had never been published in their pages. Malatsi called the fictitious citations an "unacceptable lapse" that "compromised the integrity and credibility of the draft policy." He said consequence management would follow for those responsible for drafting and quality assurance. The parliamentary portfolio committee chair suggested the department "skip using ChatGPT this time" when redrafting. The document will be revised before being reissued for public comment, but no timeline has been given. The scandal leaves South Africa without a formal AI governance framework and raises questions about whether the department responsible for regulating AI has the institutional capacity to evaluate the systems it proposes to oversee.