Description: South Africa's Department of Home Affairs reportedly appended apparent AI-generated fictitious references to its Cabinet-approved Revised White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection. The department said the references were not cited in the body, withdrew the standalone list, suspended two senior officials, and commissioned an independent review of policy documents produced since November 2022. It maintained that the paper's substantive policy positions were unaffected.
Editor Notes: See also: Incident 1467: South Africa Draft National AI Policy Reportedly Included Fictitious References Believed to Be AI Hallucinations.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Large language model developers and Generative AI developers developed an AI system deployed by South African Department of Home Affairs , Government of South Africa and Government agencies, which harmed General public of South Africa , General public , Epistemic integrity and Citizenship, immigration, and refugee policy stakeholders.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Large language models and Generative AI systems
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1548
Report Count
3
Incident Date
2026-04-30
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
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Carli van Wyk post-incident response
Home Affairs suspends two officials over use of AI "hallucinations"
The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) is suspending two senior officials with immediate effect following the detection of apparent Artificial Intelligence (AI) "hallucinatio…
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The Department of Communication and Digital Technology (DCDT) and the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) have suspended four officials over an ongoing snafu involving AI-generated sources in government policy.
The suspensions of two individua…
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The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) is the latest arm of government to have discovered the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in one of its policy papers.
The department on Thursday announced the suspension of two officials associated wit…
Variants
A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
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