I built an AI agent that catches other AI agents' fake citations — in 4 days, on Qwen Cloud
How "vibe citing" became a product, and what I learned making one LLM police another.
In June 2026, KPMG pulled a flagship report on agentic AI after investigators found that only 5 of its 45 citations pointed to real, supporting sources. The rest were paraphrased fragments, misattributed papers, or links that simply didn't contain the claims they were supposed to back. GPTZero, who ran the investigation, coined a name for it: vibe citing.
Here's the uncomfortable part: this isn't a KPMG problem. Every team shipping AI-drafted reports, research summaries, or documentation is one unchecked draft away from the same headline. Hallucination benchmarks in 2026 still show inline-citation factuality failing at rates between 22% and 94% depending on the model and task.
And prompting won't fix it. You can beg a model to "only cite real sources" all day; it will nod and fabricate. What works is grounding — actually fetching the source and checking the claim against it. That's not a prompt. That's a tool.
