KPMG has pulled a report titled “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI“ after multiple organisations said the claims it made about their AI usage were either untrue or misleading. UBS, the UK's National Health Service, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London all told the Financial Times that the report's descriptions of their AI deployments were wrong.

GPTZero, the AI detection firm, identified the inaccuracies and told the FT they stemmed from AI hallucinations. In other words, a professional services firm used AI to help write a report about AI, and the AI made things up about the companies it was supposedly analysing.

The report was published in October 2025 and has now been removed from KPMG's websites. A spokesperson said the firm is conducting its own investigation. “We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources,” the spokesperson said.

KPMG is not the first professional services firm to get caught. Last month, EY withdrew a report on loyalty rewards programmes that appeared to include fake footnotes and AI hallucinations. South Africa withdrew its entire national AI policy after at least six of its 67 academic citations were found to be AI-generated fabrications.

The pattern is consistent: organisations use AI to produce authoritative-looking content, skip the verification step, and publish claims that turn out to be fictional. The KPMG case is particularly embarrassing because the report was specifically about AI adoption, meaning the subject matter should have made the authors more careful about AI-generated errors, not less.

For KPMG's clients, the incident raises a harder question. If the firm's public-facing thought leadership uses AI without adequate human review, what level of oversight applies to the work it delivers under contract? KPMG partnered with Anthropic earlier this year to deploy Claude across all 276,000 staff. The partnership is designed to embed AI into advisory, audit, and tax work. The pulled report is a preview of what happens when that embedding outpaces the verification.